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.
You’d be surprised how much stuff you can miss in books and still be clipping along ;)
But in all seriousness, I have ADHD and sometimes my mind wanders and I have to rewind but it’s not often… anymore.
I found audiobooks to be a learned habit. I started with books I knew well already (hello Harry Potter) or books I watched the movies for (Lord of the Rings). It helped if I tuned out because I wasn’t going to to miss anything I didn’t already know.
A couple of pluses on audiobooks is that you can increase or decrease the reading speed depending on your comfortability (I usually sit between 1.4x - 1.6x, YMMV and it depends on the pacing of the recorded person). Also, you experience the authors work entirely without skipping things (which we often do as readers)