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by jawns 1018 days ago
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.

2 comments

> hiccups in the source material

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

Good luck with that!

Absolutely.

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