I believe that the "narrator" on Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom is done with text-to-speech. It's ironic given the subject matter, but the intonation and pro

I believe that the "narrator" on Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom is done with text-to-speech. It's ironic given the subject matter, but the intonation and pronunciation is just too consistent and repetitive. A lot of reviews comment on the speaker (the underlying voice is an upper class English accent with a rather actorly demeanor), but I think they're being thrown off or maybe find it convincing enough not to consider this possiblity. With normal human narrators there's always a bit of variety whereas with this audiobook it was just identical, like a machine. I ended up returning the book as it was tiresome and distracting to listen to, but it shows the potential. As others have said, to an extent you could program this without AI using some current techniques but it would be impractical. An area that might help in this regard is efforts with GST, global style tokens, as this should allow more variation. Clearly more work needs to be done to get it to be more acceptable, but there are some examples here: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/global_style_tokens/ https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/global_style_...