I can get that for free. There are apps that will read an ebook to you already. The whole point of paying the premium on audible is the superior reading/acting. Not put up with mispronounced words, weird cadence and an inability to handle acronyms
I’ve tried one that works surprisingly well. Each sentence had great pacing, cadence, and correct enunciation- even had tone right when someone was shouting or angry or sad.
I wouldn’t really recommend it, though. While I couldn’t pick any single thing out that was wrong, overall it just didn’t quite flow. It’s like watching someone try to act that is technically doing everything right, but it just isn’t good. It basically didn’t understand the greater context of the story and was saying lines.
It was uncanny valley, but exclusively with voice.
I thought people mainly paid for the large library
Is there an offline tool that generates realistic audio for epubs as Mp3 ? Something like the free Ai tool, Vibe which is for transcription. Is there something similar for TTS, runs locally without complicated setup ( most are complicated using python and etc just for installation)
edit: needs to be close to realistic or at least accurate pronunciation because I am using the audio from books to learn languages. To improve listening comprehension while reading book.
I’ve loaded epubs into the app ReadEra, which lets you read it like any other novel app or will, in real time, read it to you. It’s not the most natural of speech, but was good enough for my commute when I was in the midst of a compelling book.
Download TTS Server, and change the engine in Readera to use it. Use the Microsoft Azure settings in TTS, much more realistic. Little slow though is my only complaint as it sends/receives a paragraph at time, resulting in a pause now and again.
How do I do that? Have both readera and tts server on a Samsung Galaxy
Great question! I need to come back to this thread to see if something is suggested.
Looking for iOS recommendations, preferably without a subscription that can read epub/pdf
I’m an android user, so not sure if it’s on iOS but I’ve used ReadEra
It’s on iOS.
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
This has actually got me thinking differently about AI all together.
The best use for AI needs to be for the individual. I want MY ai to read books or research with or complete tasks for me.
I don’t want another company to do it for me or monetize it or steal content with it.
Yep, copyright doesn’t apply to AI generated content.
(edit: the original book copyright would still apply however… So would only be public domain if the book itself was also public domain)
free AI read audiobooks coming up
you couldn’t pay me to listen to an AI narrated book
Me too: there’s just something about how repetitive thier cadence can be, and putting random infections and stresses on words where it doesn’t make sense.
How about I spin up an AI model that outputs a near 1:1 copy of the training data?
Does that circumvent the copyright?
Duno, probably to some extent, similarly to how remixes of music sometimes have to pay royalties to the source of the sample if it’s recognisable…?
Actually would probably be more similar to the George Carlin AI impersonation lawsuit , but they settled, so idk.
AI voices are not trained on books.
The ethical issue there is more around cloning celebrities
but AI itself is
Not sure what you are trying to say here. AI itself is an equation.
AI models have been trained on copyright protected books illegally. Maybe the voice have not
In this case the AI voices are reading the exact copyrighted material so the original author or rights holder must be contacted to secure the necessary rights and licensing agreements. There is no free use argument.
Now, if the voices have been trained on copy protected sources to create a likenesses (e.g. Scarlet Johansson) then there could be a lawsuit.
Well, yeah, you can. Whoever told you that you can’t, don’t believe them, they are probably being payed to say it. You could also pay for the book to support the author but most likely your money will not go to the author so don’t bother.
I like your way of thinking
isn’t the current law not recognising AI stuff for copyright?
IE, downloading their audiobooks illegally is impossible are they are by default in the public domain.
Hmmm, you might have a case but maybe not.
The US Copyright office currently does not recognize protections for AI-generated works, and for portions of complete works that are AI-generated. For example, if a comic has graphics generated by AI but a script written by people, the graphics and character likenesses, etc are not protected by copyright.
For audiobooks, the original work and the accompanying recording are both protected by copyright. The audiobook is considered a derivative work, so it may still be protected based on the fact that the original work is rightfully protected by copyright.
I prefer listening to real people. No matter how good AI voices become, I still like knowing that the one reading the book to me understands what they are saying.
WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT. ROBOTS CAN SHOW EMOTION.
AS A FELLOW HUMAN I APPRECIATE YOUR INSIGHTFUL FEELINGS
I watch those movie recaps from YouTube while I work. The AI was obviously talking about a nine one one call but called it a nine hundred and eleven. Or when it’s talking about nine eleven. It instantly snaps you out of it. It’s sorta funny as background noise but I would 100% be avoiding it as a purchase.
I completely agree. I don’t even like it when the human reader clearly doesn’t understand what they’re saying, so some AI flatly telling me the story isn’t going to cut it.
For the humans, someone mispronounced “quay” for example. “La Jolla” was another standout mistake that took me out of the story.
Dude, I know how you feel xD back in 2009 I bought an audio recording of the first Twilight book because I was curious about ehat the fuss was about. It was in Danish, as I am Danish, and the narrator, bless her, had a very Danish way of pronouncing the word “flirting”. In Danish we don’t have a modern word for flirting so we just use the English one with English pronunciation, but this lady, who already sounded like she was in her 60s, just went full Dane on that word and it completely took me out of the story and had me yell at my ghettoblaster “FLIRTING” everytime she pronounced her mutilated version of that word. I don’t even know how to write a phonetic version of what the fuck she said, but I’ll try.
Fleert-eh
Fuck me, it’s been almost 16 years and just spelling it out made my skin crawl.
I also hated that book, but that wasn’t really the narrator’s fault. Had to pause the fuck out of it several times and rage clean my apartment. Nobody had told me about how it romanticized abusive relationships and I had JUST gotten out of one of those so to say I was triggered was an understatement. The mispronounciations of flirting were just the garnish on top, lol.
The issue is there’s a million books out there with no audio and never will. Im ok with Ai doing readings on books that wouldn’t otherwise get an audio version
Yeah i can see worls of non fiction being a good candidate.
Sure, but it is still lame for a company like Audible to expect people to pay for their service and then they decide to cut costs by switching to AI voices. They can afford to hire actors to read their books. They have no excuse to go do that.
Meanwhile what you’re talking about if books and stories that may not get to be picked to be narrated and well, I can see where ai voices could be a benefit in those cases. Especially for people with dyslexia.
I just disagree with a company that sells itself on narrated books and then they go and have robots read their shit? Why should anyone pay for that? Because I’m sure their prices wouldn’t go down either.
And when all is said and done, personally, I just prefer that a human being is reading to me. Especially if it is fiction.
Does audible actually do the audiobooks? I assumed it was the publishers. Sometimes the books i want aren’t available on audio which I listen to while working
I assumed they did. Maybe not all, to be fair, but I am pretty sure they have produced audio recordings of books in the past(?)
Maybe I’m just tripping, I dunno.
Its not that audible hires the narator themselves more like they just ways of putting writers in Touch with narrators
There are Audible originals that you can only get on their platform. Audiobook sellers like libro.fm and streamers like Storytel don’t get access to those.
With machine voice with no attempts at imitate human’s intonation - yes.
Hey for the deaf and people who need the info on the page, robot voice is better than nothing.
Just pretend the book is being narrated by Stephen Hawking!
Audiobooks for the deaf? Excuse me?
I meant eye deaf
Sign language books. Now there’s a hole in the market 😆
Accessibility and performance art are separate categories
Ok?
Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.
Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.
I hate so much that this has a 100% chance of becoming a norm. Narrator can make a mediocre book shine, or turn a good book into a fucking rollercoaster (Andy Serkis, anyone?)
AI? Not a great narrator. Its character voices are boring, intonations weird, pacing awful. I’d honestly rather get an amateur narrating it for fun, over a robot sounding like a knock-off Morgan Freeman.
I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.
It wasn’t the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.
tiktok voice:
hate. let me tell you how much i’ve come to hate you since i began to live. there are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex…
unironically, that is a character that could use an uncanny robotic AI voice.
The professional ai voices are amazing
It’s Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
Idk, they have pretty good stats that nobody will listen to an audio book if they don’t like the narrator, so being able to choose your own narrator on the fly isn’t really shitty
Enshittification isn’t adding new features that people want, it’s gradually lowering the quality of the product. So here if Audible is solely adding more possibilities, never at the cost of higher quality ones degrading, then indeed I’m wrong.
If though they hire less people to do good voice acting, then it’s really shitty.
I genuinely hope I’m wrong and they are ONLY adding new capabilities… but my entire experience with capitalism is that obtaining a monopolistic position is not done to improve quality but rather to increase margins regardless of how.
We’ll see!
Well that’s a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….
This consumer says you don’t get a red cent then!
It’s already a plague on youtube where half of the docu style vids are AI narrated already. I quit them in disgust. It’s so frustrating. It has eroded my perception of Youtube in short time.
Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
Pretty much anything handling unstructed data (audio, video, text) is using training data that has copyrighted content.
Oh, goody! I hope they use that TikTok lady’s voice! It’s my favorite!
Am I glad to have dropped everything Amazon.
I de-audibled my entire library, stored on Audiobookshelf and I’ll only buy audiobooks from libro.fm
This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.
There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it’s impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
There are thousands of books released every year. That’s impossible to cover even in English alone.
Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.
In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.
Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
And you think anyone is training AI voice models for those languages? Have you even seen how long it takes even large companies like Google to support the languages with hundreds of millions of speakers?
That’s the benefit of using AI and machine learning - once you have enough source material, you can throw it all in and it’ll eventually spit out a model.
Which is exactly what Meta did with their Massively Multilingual Speech project which supports text-to-speech and speech-to-text for 1107 different languages.Is it actually any good in 99% of them, I don’t have a clue, but it exists.
Seems more like a proof of concept project for that paper than something they are pursuing seriously judging by the GitHub location in some example folder that hasn’t seen any significant updates in over a year. If it is so great I would assume they would pursue it more actively and replace existing models with it two years later.
It becomes easier and cheaper every day. Today’s open source LLMs are better than last year’s best model.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding the comment you replied to, they are not saying that voice AI are bad, they are saying there is not enough training data to improve the AI for these languages. How will it improve without good training data?
Thats not how AI training works and even then there’s absolutely enough data. Also training data can be created and even synthesized. There are many techniques to extract make training value from datasets that we discover every year - It’s really not a problem you think it is.
I’m genuinely confused how AI illiterate users here are. It’s just blind leading the blind.
Is it? I just tried again yesterday for a simple script since coding is the one thing apparently AI will replace people like me and it could not put together a working JavaScript script.
I have yet to see tangible results not announced by the people with sunken cost exploding their balls.
Sounds like a skill issue my dude. While you struggle to get a js script people are putting out entire programs with AI assistants so sure - you’re right and they’re wrong
yeah, I guess I didn’t prompt right lol
Yes, to effectively use AI you actually have to understand the medium you’re in to describe the problem you’re trying to solve. You can get there with prompting but it’ll take you much longer if you just don’t understand code yourself.
Thats why most senior software devs are not afraid of LLMs cause they need strong oversight and thats exactly what years of software dev experience trained you to do.
I’m a programmer with 22 years of experience. I understood the code well enough having written the solution myself the day before; I was precisely trying to see if AI would be useful with this example as it was a tad above basic stuff but not niche at all…
It failed miserably. The code ran but didn’t do anyithing at all or it did the wrong thing 4updating the wrong column for example). It would often ignore my requirements in favour of something easier
The worst part is it kept saying it “got it” and telling me some bs about why it didn’t work just to not correct it
Thats why most senior software devs are not afraid of LLMs cause they need strong oversight and thats exactly what years of software dev experience trained you to do.
what’s the point of this? If it cannot provide clean code and I have to check every line myself, I rather work with a junior who would usually do better, actually learn from my feedback and their experience and eventually become an independant asset
Stop drinking the kool aid
dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
I’m pretty sure they’d be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
Sure but that’s not how free markets work. If there’s only 3 million consumers you can’t afford 3 million voice actors but you can afford 3 million AI renders.
I’m not an economist but… 1 voice actor can serve 3 million consumers if they listen to the same content.
Anyway that’s not even my point, my point is that it is possible to cover, we as a society, driven both by VC with strategies of capturing markets (so precisely going against “free” market as an ideal) and consumers are making choices (like when one buys from the local farmer market vs Amazon deliveries). If though we, while fully understanding the consequence of such choice (namely how the sausage is made, here how AI models are trained and then run), believe it’s not valuable then sure, we can make that choice.
I’m just warning consumers then that if they don’t pay for quality content made a certain way, they can’t complain that they in turn don’t get the job they wanted because nobody out there is ready to pay for it.
2 sides of the same coin.
but for a service like audible.
