3 ms·

To me this feels like the automated video slideshows that Apple Photos (and undoubtedly Google Photos) makes for you. Perfectly fine, but indeed even on a casua

To me this feels like the automated video slideshows that Apple Photos (and undoubtedly Google Photos) makes for you. Perfectly fine, but indeed even on a casual watch you notice mistakes/imperfections you'd never make if you were producing such slideshow manually. But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? I think almost any audiobook listener will vastly prefer a serviceable but imperfect audiobook when compared with no audiobook at all.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Agreed. I bought an old Kindle for traveling because I could use its TTS to listen to ebooks. Now that's a common feature of most reader apps, yet at the time it was rare and even newer Kindles had dropped TTS.
klondike_klive 4y ago
I find those slideshows unintentionally hilarious - ten photos of my kid interspersed with a flash photo of the back of the washing machine and some cable that's hanging down underneath my car, an accidental screen grab of a text message, all treated with the same importance and jaunty library soundtrack.
- smugma 4y ago
  This made me LOL, as I’ve had this happen many times. But much less so in the past 2 years, around the time iOS Photos started integrating with Apple Music.
  - klondike_klive 4y ago
    Actually now you come to mention it I haven't noticed it very recently - maybe I've stopped looking at those suggested slideshows, maybe I've turned a setting off without realising it.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? Any book of any length took countless hours to write and edit. Yes, I think it's worth a bit of extra time for a human to go through and read the thing aloud. If the alternative really is no audiobook at all... okay, I guess something is better than nothing. But on the whole, I'd like publishers to just record more audiobooks, and I'm concerned this technology will result in fewer "real" audiobooks being produced.

paulryanrogers 4y ago

Agreed. I bought an old Kindle for traveling because I could use its TTS to listen to ebooks. Now that's a common feature of most reader apps, yet at the time it was rare and even newer Kindles had dropped TTS.

klondike_klive 4y ago

I find those slideshows unintentionally hilarious - ten photos of my kid interspersed with a flash photo of the back of the washing machine and some cable that's hanging down underneath my car, an accidental screen grab of a text message, all treated with the same importance and jaunty library soundtrack.

smugma 4y ago
This made me LOL, as I’ve had this happen many times. But much less so in the past 2 years, around the time iOS Photos started integrating with Apple Music.
- klondike_klive 4y ago
  Actually now you come to mention it I haven't noticed it very recently - maybe I've stopped looking at those suggested slideshows, maybe I've turned a setting off without realising it.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

> But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? Any book of any length took countless hours to write and edit. Yes, I think it's worth a bit of extra time for a human to go through and read the thing aloud. If the alternative really is no audiobook at all... okay, I guess something is better than nothing. But on the whole, I'd like publishers to just record more audiobooks, and I'm concerned this technology will result in fewer "real" audiobooks being produced.