Audiobooks

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40,000 AI-narrated audiobooks flood Audible, dividing authors and listeners (www.techspot.com)

submitted 6 months ago by ptz@dubvee.org to c/audiobooks@literature.cafe

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I definitely do not want to support this practice, but there's no way to filter these out 😠.

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[–] ptz@dubvee.org 14 points 6 months ago

I mean, when that time and effort is someone's chosen profession, then there's only so many ways it can go.

The authors are free to not release an audiobook with some soulless, robotic voice behind it and stick to print/ebook. Amazon is also free to use the AI voices as enhanced TTS for regular books, and I would be fine with that (no one expects those to sound human, and they're not sold as audiobooks).

For me, the narrator makes the audiobook experience. As an example, pretty much all of the Revelation Space series was narrated by John Lee. One of the later books was narrated by someone else (forget their name, but they were definitely forgettable), and it just didn't do it for me. It was an actual person, but they read it so robotically I lost interest halfway through the prologue and just read it on e-reader.