I find them a horrible listening experience. Complete lack of nuance in the AI voice samples to which I've listened.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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It can be done but you have to manually set inflection on almost every line. Even then, it’s a pale comparison to a voice actor who knows the story and puts emotion into it. It’s a double edged blade, on one hand more books get audio versions, on the other they are soulless readings that fail to capture the tone of the text.
I have mild aphantasia and human inflection/emotion helps me enjoy books. While AI might bring more audiobooks to market, those are lost on me. I might as well be listening to someone read a phone book.
Welp, there's goes another career group.
I did voiceovers and book narrations for some years. (Still do the latter at Librivox.)
I'm biased, but there is clearly a quality in the human voice that AI will never capture.
I agree with you. And I really hope human voice acting and voice-overs remain a thing. It irritates me when I find an interesting YouTube video and then it's clear that the narration is being done using an AI voice. The quality of them is improving, but they are still pretty obvious. Give me an actual human narrator every time.
Let me now unveil my plans never to listen to any such book.
It's not official until you do a press conference
Consider my previous comment a press release. Someone please find an AI voice to read it for me.
The original kindle did something similar until it caught the attention of the audio book industry and then stopped.
Sounds awful. Half the books I’ve listened to have poor narrators to begin with. I doubt AI can do a better job at emoting than a human actor.