[Borrible]

Sounded better than the handful of random corresponding Librivox recordings I listened to in order to compare them. To be honest, a lot of people go to great lengths to make Librivox recordings without having the skills to read aloud.

Which is a pity, but nonetheless.

[jawns]

I agree. I love the idea of Librivox, but the volunteers vary widely in quality.

Some are non-native English speakers, some have lisps or other articulation problems, some have other marks of fluency deficiencies, some have under- or over-dramatic intonation, etc.

And even if they're perfect voice actors, often their microphone setups are sub-par, and it comes through in the recording.

Frankly, these AI voices are now at a level where the few mistakes they make are easier to forgive than some of those issues from human readers.

That said, the final hurdle -- giving them the brains to know when to skip or resolve hiccups in the source material, such as typos, formatting issues, or text not intended to be read aloud -- is going to be very hard to overcome.

[everybodyknows]

> hiccups in the source material

From Joyce's Ulysses (capitalization possibly wrong): "nes. yo."

Good luck with that!

[Borrible]

Absolutely.

So, will your books be available with an audio section as a free encore in the future? :)

[dirtyid]

It's getting more passable. As someone who listens to a lot of TTS at high speed for years, eventually I adapted my brain do it and now it feels similar to phsyical reading with subvocalization where I can adjust the voices of characters. It's occasionally even preferrable, i.e. too much over produced podcasts these days where I just TTS the transcript.