[1MachineElf]

Listening to an audiobook narrated by an AI voice can get old after a few hours. There is absolutely still hope for traditional voice narration, especially if different voice actors want to voice different characters in the story.

[ramesh31]

I imagine this will sit where the LibriVox recordings did before. "Good enough" to cover the vast amount of works that never received studio treatment, but not anything that will ever replace a human at the high end. Even if the likeness is absolutely perfect, people will still prefer to know they are actually listening to their favorite actor.

[jokethrowaway]

This is step 1. Bark already has some models which try to match the tone to what's written.

We'll get there.

[lacrimacida]

Why do we need to get there? What’s the end goal?

[mxmlnkn]

People can listen to every book they want in decent quality instead having to wait for it to be adapted as an audio book. Of course blind people would especially welcome this. Audio books would get cheaper, which seems like a desirable trait to me. In the end, all of these AI "conversions" are menial in a way anyway, so why not automate it. Having access to these automations, hopefully subscription free, would also be a kind of freedom for everyone. The freedom to consume information in any form you want. A universal translator isn't all that different from this in that regard.

As for actual creative tasks, that is another matter altogether. I can only hope that real creativity doesn't die out and that TV series and other things don't get any more homogenous than they already have become. At least there are still enjoyable outliers in this plethora of entertainment output. And in some way, audio books can also be creative if they really add emotions that aren't written down exactly. Similar to how the same sheet music can be adapted by different musicians in slightly different ways or instruments and such. Even if all of that could be synthesized, what it means is that selection of the results would become the creative task. Just like stable diffusion and others output hundreds of images for a prompt but only a few are actually interesting. By definition of this automation, you will always end up with more than you can consume and finding the right result for the right people then becomes the next hurdle.

I still wonder though, whether new entertainment really is necessary until the end of times. There probably are already more books and music in the world to last you a lifetime. And after 100 to 200 years of continuous TV and movie output, you probably could just reshow the ones from a decade ago for the next generation, no need to rehash everything. This assumes that there are no new media though, such as maybe walkable VR movies. But even film from decades ago can be remastered in 4k and I begin to doubt that anything above 4k makes much sense. Even 2k is still perfectly fine to me.

[tredre3]

We have millions of digitized books by now. Only a very very small percentage of those are worth spending the money to turn into an audiobook narrated by a human.

A lot of people do not read books (for various reasons: they are blind, they are driving, they are jogging, they are doing chores, they just don't enjoy reading), leaving millions of pieces of art inaccessible to them.

Getting TTS quality up to near human narration level means absolutely everything will become available to them overnight.

It seems like a big win to me.

[bombcar]

Nearly perfect, or even “usable” audiobooks of anything I have in text form is desirable to me, at least.

[atrus]

To eliminate work of course. To advance the state of technology where everyone can have the base essentials for free, or as low a cost as physically possible.

[onecommentman]

You should listen to these Project Gutenberg audiotexts…they are really pretty good. I would have no problem listening to them for an extended period. The real challenge Project Gutenberg faced was automating the removal of the random metadata noise from the original plain text versions of the content. And it will continually improve from acceptably good to excellent in short order with perhaps a tiny amount of hand tuning.

It isn’t just the blind who benefit. As you age, eyesight degrades and the mind dulls. At some point, audiobooks are a real boon, especially with PD texts where you can read until you get tired, then listen. Also the growing demographic of live-alone elderly like the background sounds of people talking in their residence, explaining part of the popularity of talk radio. They feel a little less lonely. These audiotexts provide an intellectually varied and overall healthier option. It seems like an Absolute Good to me.

[bombcar]

AI audiobooks also seem they’re ripe for “perfection over time” where parts are indicated where it’s not pronounced right or needs additional inflection, etc, and that can be rerendered.