I just listened to this AI generated audiobook and if it didn’t say it was AI, I’d have thought it was human-made. It has different voices, dramatization, sound effects… The last I’d heard about this tech was a post saying Stephen Fry’s voice was stolen and replicated by AI. But since then, nothing, even though it’s clearly advanced incredibly fast. You’d expect more buzz for something that went from detectable as AI to indistinguishable from humans so quickly. How is it that no one is talking about AI generated audiobooks and their rapid improvement? This seems like a huge deal to me.
A lot of audiobook voices are harmful to the industry. Plenty of times I’ve listened to a book for ten minutes and said nevermind because the voice actor was terrible, making wet mouth sounds or their voice was just annoying or the audio quality was terrible.
I love the multi book series where they hire a different narrator for certain books and they end up pronouncing names and places differently than the first narrator.