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When I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to my 8 yr old daughter, we play a game. She asks me to change one of the words in the page and she tries to listen and see if she

• prepend 3y ago
  > But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party. I think the question is really “Will I be able to enjoy great books I otherwise would not have experienced?” For me, it’s not that these are superior or equivalent books to parents reading to their kid or voice actors; it’s whether I’ll listen to a book for free that I wouldn’t be able to afford $10-30.
  • low_tech_love 3y ago
    Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify). If you’re not willing to go even with that in order to listen to an actual human, then maybe yeah, you can try AI.
    • joshgachnang 3y ago
      It's not at all like Spotify. The library you get for $7.95/mo is very limited. If it was like Spotify I'd happily pay a hell of a lot more than that.
    • philomath_mn 3y ago
      > Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify) Not true at all. Audible Plus gives you access to a tiny subset of the full library, the rest (which includes all the best titles) need to be purchased separately.
      • bodge5000 3y ago
        Unless things have changed since I was a subscriber, you get a token every month which can be used to purchase any book from the full library. So its effectively 1 book a month + a few extras bonuses for $7.95
        • izzydata 3y ago
          You don't get a token without paying for the premium plan at $15 a month. Also, don't tell anyone but if you subscribe and then cancel and give the reason that it is too expensive you can often get a reduced price the next few months.
    • prepend 3y ago
      Audible is $15/month and you get to choose one title. I think you’re confusing audible today with audible of 20 years ago.
      • thinkmassive 3y ago
        I typically buy at least two titles per month, and the best deal ended up being: Audible Premium Plus - 1 Credit Every Other Month for $17 ($8.50/mo) You can buy 3 more credits for $37.99 (12.66/ea). It’s also worth checking individual titles because quite a few cost less than the credits. Correction: I guess I actually buy slightly fewer than 2/mo because there’s a plan for that ($22.95/mo) that’s cheaper than the 27.50/mo from my numbers above. I had that one for a while but ended up feeling pressured to use them before they expire.
        • swores 3y ago
          You probably won't be interested since it's even more pressure to use them before they expire, but there's also annual plans which are even cheaper if you can be happy using 12 (or 24) tokens within 12 months (you get them at the start and they expire at the end of the year): Audible Premium Plus Annual - 12 Credits $149.50/year (way cheaper in UK: £69.99/year) Audible Premium Plus Annual - 24 Credits $229.50/year (£109.99/year) US: https://www.audible.com/ep/memberbenefits https://www.audible.com/ep/memberbenefits UK: https://help.audible.co.uk/s/article/what-are-the-different-membership-plans-audible-offers https://help.audible.co.uk/s/article/what-are-the-different-... Although, as soon as I'm logged in with my account (UK) which had subscribed in the past but isn't currently, it doesn't seem to be giving me any options except to start a 1 month free trial for 1 token/month, not sure if other options aren't available or just extremely well hidden... edit: no it is available for my account, though I'm going to remain a non-subscriber and keep using my local digital library :)
          • thinkmassive 3y ago
            Hah thank you, the optionality is worth $0.20/mo to me. I wish there were better options for listening 20-25 hours/mo. Like Amazon in general, the selection + convenience is tough to beat.
  • therealdrag0 3y ago
    Plus lots of books don’t have audiobooks. I’ve a few sitting on my to read list for years on end just cuz there’s no audio. Being able to make one myself with AI would be awesome.
    • prepend 3y ago
      This precisely. Also, I’ve bought ebooks and want to listen to the book but don’t want to pay again for the voice acting. So I’ve bought a license to the IP and would like to listen rather than read.
• barrenko 3y ago
  We're living through the Great Enshitification.
  • fuzztester 3y ago
    And it is living through us, or on us.
• janekm 3y ago
  Elevenlabs is a lot closer to compelling audiobook narration (needs a better way to deal with multiple characters in a story without manual use of multiple voices): https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLabs_2023-09-11T13_41_26_Readwell%20-%20Deep%20and%20narrative_gen_s50_sb75_se0_b_m2.mp3 https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa... (an H.G.Wells example I just asked it to read).
  • tkgally 3y ago
    I was going to mention ElevenLabs, too. Their samples are very impressive in how the intonation and word stress are varied based on the text’s meaning. Their pricing is a bit high for personal use, though. (The link you posted seems to have been truncated. Can you try posting it again?)
    • janekm 3y ago
      Yeah, sadly it'd cost about $100 to get a book per month... Not quite competitive with Audible yet, but give it a year perhaps, or a few iterations of the open source models... (fixed the link)
      • shaky-carrousel 3y ago
        100 dollars per book, right, but that book is public and can be shared between millions of people.
  • petemir 3y ago
    ftfy https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLabs_2023-09-11T13_41_26_Readwell%20-%20Deep%20and%20narrative_gen_s50_sb75_se0_b_m2.mp3 https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa...
    • janekm 3y ago
      thanks!
  • 3y ago
• Pxtl 3y ago
  > H.G. Wells was read with a pause in between each period because it "thinks" that each letter boundary is a sentence change This is why I'm a firm "two spaces after the period" guy. Makes it unambiguous the difference between the abbrevs. period and the sentence-end period. Otherwise you get sentences like "Let's not forget that Dr. Principal does not care about this." which can be read in two valid ways.
  • ta988 3y ago
    Sidenote, I asked ChatGPT about where to put the comma and how it would change the meaning of the sentence. It got it right.
    • Pxtl 3y ago
      Fair point, the sentence I invented off the top of my head isn't perfectly grammatically correct but it's close-enough that it shows the ambiguity problem. It's a lot to ask text-to-speech and typesetting programs to figure out contextually which periods are abbreviations and which periods are end-of-sentence, and so having a hard text cue like double-space would help. Then typesetters would have a hard cue of when to replace the space with a thin-space (which is supposed to happen in the case of something like "H. G. Wells").
  • bloak 3y ago
    Of course some style guides would tell you not to put a dot after "Dr" because "r" is the last letter of "Doctor". Similarly, the abbreviation of "Saint" would be "St", while the abbreviation of "Street" would be "St.", according to those style guides. Meanwhile the GB military style guide says never to use a dot after any abbreviation, I think. Also, the style guides I'm familiar with prescribe "H. G. Wells", rather than "H.G. Wells", but "H.G.W." if you're abbreviating all of the words. None of this is of much interest to anyone who isn't an editor but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
    • Pxtl 3y ago
      > "H. G. Wells", Right. That's probably the most common historical form, and is a good example of how the punctuation for sentence-ends and abbreviations is often the same - period and then single-space.
• ecshafer 3y ago
  > Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is happy." Everything is not amazing. Sure things are amazing from a technical perspective. But most tech advancements I think have been harmful to society in the last 30 years or so. Its awesome that computers are so powerful and we have awesome video and photos and can share things so easily. But technology should better lives, and not cheapen it, which it often does. Tech is being used to try and replace essential human lived experiences to try and inject advertising into it and extract money. Technology can not replace the human, its impossible. No matter how good the AI is at reading the book, it will never replace sitting next to your parent and them reading it. No matter how easy it is to share a video or a photo, it will never replace sitting next to someone and them showing you photos, or better yet being there when the photo was taken.
  • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    > it will never replace sitting next to someone and them showing you photos It definitely does replace that. It sucks so much to be trapped next to someone showing you their photo album or vacation slides, when you don’t really care, that this became a stock scene in 20th-century comedy TV series and films. Nowadays when people are sharing their photos online, that gives their peers the choice of whether to look or whether to ignore, and that is immensely freeing.
    • mathgeek 3y ago
      You’re talking about _being shown_ photos you don’t care about, while GP is talking about showing your own photos to someone. I agree with the example you’re discussing, though.
      • c0pium 3y ago
        Ah, you’re talking about main character syndrome. Showing pictures to someone is one of the cruelest things you can do; you’re probably boring and a terrible storyteller (most people are) but they’re going to feel obligated to not tell you that. It’s always amazing to me that people almost universally hate other people’s slideshows, and then don’t have the self awareness to realize that they do the exact same thing.
• gnutrino 3y ago
  Seth Godin did a whole Akimbo podcast that was written by ChatGPT, and the audio was AI generated. The voice was spot on, the content and delivery was dead. I almost fell asleep listening to it, which is NEVER the case for any other episode of Akimbo I've listened to.
• lynx23 3y ago
  Now you have a pretty good idea how blind people must feel. Yes, a good audiobook should be read by a human. But if you dont have that, speech synthesis is the best or even only thing you can get. And then, many years later, you read a post like yours. And you realize that man is spoiled. Signed, a blind man