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Apple rolls out AI-narrated audiobooks, and it’s probably the start of a trend
- anigbrowl 4y agoOh boy, right again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271948 (In brief, a prediction that AI would negatively impact the voice acting industry within the next couple of years, which received a frosty reception.)
- rektide 4y agoKindle had this for how long before they got cold feet at disrupting/killing a whole industry? That was, what, 10 years ago? Oh, more[1][2]! I'd love to know the chronology exactly. I had mistakenly been under the impression that Kindle had actually removed the feature entirely for a long while after it's late-2000's launch, but based on what I found it was only disabled for some content, I don't see much evidence that the situation has changed much since. Initially this felt like a great shift in the tide, that Apple was deciding to re-open this can-of-worms & unabashedly go up against a trenchant & defended industry. Given where ML is today I expect much much higher quality (see: Microsoft's VALL-E for example), but whether Apple makes similar compromises to Amazon or not is very much To-Be-Determined (TBD). [1] https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-speech-kindle https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-spee... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon/amazon-to-allow-disabling-of-kindle-2-audio-idUSTRE51R02R20090228 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon/amazon-to-allow-di...