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Car journeys with the kids (and dog walks) are saved by good quality audio books (Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter and David Tenant reading the How to Train You

Car journeys with the kids (and dog walks) are saved by good quality audio books (Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter and David Tenant reading the How to Train Your Dragon books are standout favourites). Its one of those rare areas where it's still crucial to have a trained and thinking human behind it - vocal ticks and pronunciation quirks are part of the charm. I think an AI reading would be sterile and produce an unpleasant uncanny valley response.

macNchz 3y ago
Voice synthesis AI has gotten pretty impressive: https://www.audiostory.ai/2065785/12139903-a-fragment-from-the-great-gatsby-by-f-scott-fitzgerald?t=0 https://www.audiostory.ai/2065785/12139903-a-fragment-from-t... I listen to a lot of audiobooks and have definitely sampled some with narrators I found harder to listen to than that. That said, there’s a sort of droning evenness to the voice that makes me unsure I’d want to listen to an entire book’s worth, and the voice reading Gatsby is way better than the voice reading Alice in Wonderland, which I definitely couldn’t listen through.
- JZL003 3y ago
  A serial fiction book I read has only text but I still want an audio book. It takes a little bit to get used to but with text to speech, your mind figures it out and starts to put emotion in the monotone voice. It's not as good as a real narrator but Google's text to speech is maybe 60-70% as doable
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  > which I definitely couldn’t listen through. Some (presumably) professional human audiobook narrators have that effect on me!
aaronvonbaron 3y ago
The first audiobook I played for my kids was How to Train Your Dragon. David Tennant did an amazing job. Now my kids love audiobooks. Although, I still need to force them to read paper books. We also loved the Zamonia series by Walter Moers.
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and Jeeves and Wooster audiobooks (various narrators, but obviously they must be British!) are also very good way to while away a journey. Though, if a child these days got up to half as much as William, the parents would be in jail for neglect and the child would be in care and up to his eyeballs in Ritalin. And that's before we get onto the Famous Five constantly trying to get themselves murdered by smugglers.

macNchz 3y ago

Voice synthesis AI has gotten pretty impressive: https://www.audiostory.ai/2065785/12139903-a-fragment-from-the-great-gatsby-by-f-scott-fitzgerald?t=0 https://www.audiostory.ai/2065785/12139903-a-fragment-from-t... I listen to a lot of audiobooks and have definitely sampled some with narrators I found harder to listen to than that. That said, there’s a sort of droning evenness to the voice that makes me unsure I’d want to listen to an entire book’s worth, and the voice reading Gatsby is way better than the voice reading Alice in Wonderland, which I definitely couldn’t listen through.

JZL003 3y ago
A serial fiction book I read has only text but I still want an audio book. It takes a little bit to get used to but with text to speech, your mind figures it out and starts to put emotion in the monotone voice. It's not as good as a real narrator but Google's text to speech is maybe 60-70% as doable
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
> which I definitely couldn’t listen through. Some (presumably) professional human audiobook narrators have that effect on me!

aaronvonbaron 3y ago

The first audiobook I played for my kids was How to Train Your Dragon. David Tennant did an amazing job. Now my kids love audiobooks. Although, I still need to force them to read paper books. We also loved the Zamonia series by Walter Moers.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and Jeeves and Wooster audiobooks (various narrators, but obviously they must be British!) are also very good way to while away a journey. Though, if a child these days got up to half as much as William, the parents would be in jail for neglect and the child would be in care and up to his eyeballs in Ritalin. And that's before we get onto the Famous Five constantly trying to get themselves murdered by smugglers.