Why isn't everyone talking about AI generated audiobooks?

A lot of people just aren't aware of how fast AI is moving. AI voices were pretty meh earlier this year. A lot of people working on the audiobook/voice acting scene have been talking about this though.

Ah yes, Audio AI. I can't wait for this rapidly-approaching future where you literally won't be able to trust the validity of anything your senses tell you anymore

I want TTS made better with AI so that I won't need huge audiobooks filling up my phone. The epubs that I already have would serve as audiobooks when needed.

As someone who only consumes books in audiobook form this is great news for me, I tried to listen to some automatically generated audio books around 2 years ago and I found them horrible to listen to just because they sounded so off.

I'd love to be able to copy in the text of a book and get actually listenable (is that a proper word?) audiobook out of the other side for some books that will just simply never be recorded by actual people due to being too old / obscure.

I've been wanting to be able to listen to the Pelucidar books for years but they just don't exist in audio format, is there somewhere publically available that I can do this?

That sounds pretty cool, though I'd be concerned it will suffer from the classic problem of current AI (...and humans, but that's by the by) of confident incorrectness. Like an automatic transmission can miss meanings and types of context that a human will spot, programmatically generating speech can probably mess up punctuation and flow - even the way a human reader sometimes will get part way through a sentence and realise they need to start again for it to come out right.

That said, I can't see it being a big problem for most works, just unfortunate here and there. For once it seems an AI application short on downsides! (Except for the usual economic ones for many people previously trained in the field.)

There was a fairly big 40K lore channel on YouTube with a rather good AI impersonation of David Attenborough's voice and narration style/scripting. However, I just went to check it, yet it must have recently gotten hit with a DMCA and taken down. A shame really. Though I never got into 40K lore before, or the 40K franchise in general, I am a big fan of David Attenborough, and so that ended up really drawing me in to a new literary universe. However, it was a big mistake by the YouTube creator to use the name and photo likeness of Attenborough in the branding, video titles, and thumbnail art on the channel. I think without pushing that line, the AI voice with a clear disclosure could have kept the channel under the legal radar.

• https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/17b4t1v/attenborough_lore_shut_down/
• https://youtube.com/@AttenboroughLore

From the pinned comments made here, this looks to be the same creators new channel, now using a different voice, no longer based on any one real person:

• https://youtube.com/@Scholarslore
• https://youtube.com/watch?v=JnbGL8Z6KYg

I’ve been getting into audiobooks in a big way recently. This is interesting but somehow seems off to me. Maybe I’ll try listening to one and have my mind changed. We’ll see!

Audiobooks are offputting to me and I strongly prefer to read text, but this seems like a great thing overall for making books more accessible to people. More people experiencing a wider range of books is good.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

this AI generated audiobook

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Because it has the potential to become actively harmful to the audiobook industry

There are also a few AI sung songs out there that are pretty good. Most of them sound pretty Autotuny, but to some extent, that can be a style. Aura, by Ghost, is a good example. If I didn't know it was ai, I would just think it was autotune.

This is amazing. I'm the future, I''d like to try this on old books I've read in the past just to check

Because it's not a new product.

It sounds like a generative model to me, but it's probably the best one I've ever heard. Also, thanks for the link! I added it to my listen list!

Personally I don't consume audiobooks so this doesn't affect me at all.

Because they’re shit and shouldn’t exist.