Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.
Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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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.
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
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
AI voices are not trained on books.
The ethical issue there is more around cloning celebrities
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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