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"Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks" Yeah, right. What a lame attempt to deflect the (fully warranted) c

"Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks" Yeah, right. What a lame attempt to deflect the (fully warranted) criticism that this will put audiobook narrators out of work.

rickdeckard 4y ago
I think the cat is already out of the bag, and the death of human narration is imminent. The fight now seems to be whether this transformation happens only in production, or companies like Apple succeed in breaking the total Audiobook price apart into "license" and "production", only buying the license and have the production done on their proprietary servers. Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a sharp decline in professionally narrated Audiobooks...
- amelius 4y ago
  > Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a sharp decline in professionally narrated Audiobooks... Or, it will increase demand for audiobooks so much that more humans are needed to create top-notch audio.
  - rickdeckard 4y ago
    I don't know how badly narrated Audiobooks can increase the demand for Audiobooks as a whole. The only scenario I could imagine is a narration language where Audiobooks didn't exist so far for economic reasons (i.e. low population). Digital narration could bring down production costs to the point of making it economic, basically creating the audiobook market for this language. But then, if the narration is bad (which it likely is because TTS is worse in minor languages), I don't know how many users could be converted to pay a premium for a better human narration. Also here I think it's more likely that funding will be used to improve the narration engine as a whole instead of going back to hiring humans and renting a studio for each book...
- rdevsrex 4y ago
  One of the things I like is when the narrator has to suppress a laugh during a funny passage, or can express a character's anger or frustration. Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize.
  - rickdeckard 4y ago
    > One of the things I like is when the narrator has to suppress a laugh during a funny passage, or can express a character's anger or frustration. I doubt there are big issues for an AI to verbally mimic emotion. Placing emotion correctly in a long narration might be tricky if there are no indicators in the text, but I'm sure there will be a convenient self-service authoring tool where the Author/Publisher can adjust the emotion with a slider if he wants to finetune the result... > Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize. A smaller market means higher cost per-unit, so higher prices per Audiobook. If the publisher needs to meet a specific price (i.e. to be listed on flat-fee audiobook-portals) he might be forced to produce digital narration as a default, which means the market for an additional "premium human narration" will have to prove itself first. I doubt that such a bar will be reached in most cases. It's more likely that people complaining about bad narration will put pressure on AI-engines to improve, but not form a market where a critical mass will pay additional 20$ for human narration...
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    They won't be able to. Not enough people will reject computer-generated narration and insist on real narrators for them to remain employed.
karmasimida 4y ago
Can they just train a model to narrate for themselves and change section that the model makes mistakes? TBH, human narrator on Audible sometimes just reads the stuff aloud
tinus_hn 4y ago
This is as valid a criticism as complaining the phonograph will put musicians out if work. Time marches on, adapt.
prepend 4y ago
Sad for the narrators, but good for the world. There are so many books I have that don’t have an audiobook version because the economics just aren’t there. This is an easy way that technology can expand human experience. Even in situations where the author reads the book, I expect it will be cheaper to train an AI to sound like the author than to put the author in a studio for 50 hours (or whatever). I thought it was a really dumb ruling when Amazon was forced to remove the text to speech function from kindle. I also think that screen readers are hobbled to avoid this legal issue. I want to send any text through a narrator bot and have it read it to me. There is zero need to compensate anyone other than the developer who writes the AI (and hopefully it will have open source versions donated by developers). If I’ve bought a book, I should be able to use it as I like.
abraxas 4y ago
Some narrators never should have had their jobs to begin with. I'm viscerally angry at the narrator of "Permutation City" on Audible. Such a great book that could not have a more bored, disinterested narrator who clearly doesn't understand the text he's narrating. An AI TTS engine at this level would do a far better job of it than that particular dude.
33955985 4y ago
Huh? The professionally narrated audiobooks don’t get memory hole’d from the earth because Apple announced this service. The sentence you quoted is intended to emphasize that professionally narrated audiobooks will continue to be available on the platform.
elil17 4y ago
To be fair, a lot of narrators are really not doing that good of a job. I frequently hear audiobooks that have been rushed through production - mispronounced words, strange cadence, and overacting. I'll take what I heard in that demo over ACX crap any day. The current iteration of this technology is not competing with truly great narrators, like Tom Hanks or Jim Dale.
acdha 4y ago
I'm mixed on that because while I appreciate the craft of a professional narrator, I support a group of users who are mostly blind and there's a constant tradeoff between availability and the quality of an audio book. People value good recordings – people often have favorite narrators and will select books based on that, sometimes even outside their normal interests (which wasn't something I'd previously appreciated) – but if it's something you want to read, having it now versus a year from now matters.

rickdeckard 4y ago

I think the cat is already out of the bag, and the death of human narration is imminent. The fight now seems to be whether this transformation happens only in production, or companies like Apple succeed in breaking the total Audiobook price apart into "license" and "production", only buying the license and have the production done on their proprietary servers. Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a sharp decline in professionally narrated Audiobooks...

amelius 4y ago
> Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a sharp decline in professionally narrated Audiobooks... Or, it will increase demand for audiobooks so much that more humans are needed to create top-notch audio.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  I don't know how badly narrated Audiobooks can increase the demand for Audiobooks as a whole. The only scenario I could imagine is a narration language where Audiobooks didn't exist so far for economic reasons (i.e. low population). Digital narration could bring down production costs to the point of making it economic, basically creating the audiobook market for this language. But then, if the narration is bad (which it likely is because TTS is worse in minor languages), I don't know how many users could be converted to pay a premium for a better human narration. Also here I think it's more likely that funding will be used to improve the narration engine as a whole instead of going back to hiring humans and renting a studio for each book...
rdevsrex 4y ago
One of the things I like is when the narrator has to suppress a laugh during a funny passage, or can express a character's anger or frustration. Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  > One of the things I like is when the narrator has to suppress a laugh during a funny passage, or can express a character's anger or frustration. I doubt there are big issues for an AI to verbally mimic emotion. Placing emotion correctly in a long narration might be tricky if there are no indicators in the text, but I'm sure there will be a convenient self-service authoring tool where the Author/Publisher can adjust the emotion with a slider if he wants to finetune the result... > Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize. A smaller market means higher cost per-unit, so higher prices per Audiobook. If the publisher needs to meet a specific price (i.e. to be listed on flat-fee audiobook-portals) he might be forced to produce digital narration as a default, which means the market for an additional "premium human narration" will have to prove itself first. I doubt that such a bar will be reached in most cases. It's more likely that people complaining about bad narration will put pressure on AI-engines to improve, but not form a market where a critical mass will pay additional 20$ for human narration...
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  They won't be able to. Not enough people will reject computer-generated narration and insist on real narrators for them to remain employed.

karmasimida 4y ago

Can they just train a model to narrate for themselves and change section that the model makes mistakes? TBH, human narrator on Audible sometimes just reads the stuff aloud

tinus_hn 4y ago

This is as valid a criticism as complaining the phonograph will put musicians out if work. Time marches on, adapt.

prepend 4y ago

Sad for the narrators, but good for the world. There are so many books I have that don’t have an audiobook version because the economics just aren’t there. This is an easy way that technology can expand human experience. Even in situations where the author reads the book, I expect it will be cheaper to train an AI to sound like the author than to put the author in a studio for 50 hours (or whatever). I thought it was a really dumb ruling when Amazon was forced to remove the text to speech function from kindle. I also think that screen readers are hobbled to avoid this legal issue. I want to send any text through a narrator bot and have it read it to me. There is zero need to compensate anyone other than the developer who writes the AI (and hopefully it will have open source versions donated by developers). If I’ve bought a book, I should be able to use it as I like.

abraxas 4y ago

Some narrators never should have had their jobs to begin with. I'm viscerally angry at the narrator of "Permutation City" on Audible. Such a great book that could not have a more bored, disinterested narrator who clearly doesn't understand the text he's narrating. An AI TTS engine at this level would do a far better job of it than that particular dude.

33955985 4y ago

Huh? The professionally narrated audiobooks don’t get memory hole’d from the earth because Apple announced this service. The sentence you quoted is intended to emphasize that professionally narrated audiobooks will continue to be available on the platform.

elil17 4y ago

To be fair, a lot of narrators are really not doing that good of a job. I frequently hear audiobooks that have been rushed through production - mispronounced words, strange cadence, and overacting. I'll take what I heard in that demo over ACX crap any day. The current iteration of this technology is not competing with truly great narrators, like Tom Hanks or Jim Dale.

acdha 4y ago

I'm mixed on that because while I appreciate the craft of a professional narrator, I support a group of users who are mostly blind and there's a constant tradeoff between availability and the quality of an audio book. People value good recordings – people often have favorite narrators and will select books based on that, sometimes even outside their normal interests (which wasn't something I'd previously appreciated) – but if it's something you want to read, having it now versus a year from now matters.