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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

If anything it could be _improved_ by deep learning. Shitty narrators will disappear, and we'll get high production values audiobooks instead, assuming humans want to get paid, a-la Dune, where there's an entire cast of well selected voice actors narrating the book, and the result is amazing.

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I agree. I once put down an audiobook (Xenocide or Children of the mind, don't remember which one) because I couldn't stand one of the voice actors. She did a Japanese accent so overdone, it was so bad that I just skipped all those sections of the story.

Having the choice between a monotone narration and the voice actors in this case would be a much welcome improvement.

Oh yep. I listened to a full cast reading of The Man of Legends by Kenneth Johnson a couple of months ago and the narration was pretty good on the most part. There was a section that was told from the point of view of a young Hispanic girl and I couldn't understand much of it all. Really annoying.

At least one of the narrators (who were all American) did a Chinese accent for some sections of Xenocide, and I felt that was the wrong move, considering that the characters were speaking to each other in their native language, not Chinese characters speaking English.

Depends whether by "the industry" you mean "businesses making audiobooks" or "people working as audiobook narrators."

Let's put it this way: it's difficult for me to find the time to even listen to an excellently narrated audiobook. I'm not going to listen to something narrated by a machine without intonation if I can avoid it. But I had to suffer through one book (Disciplined Entrepreneurship, if you must know) where narration was so bad I wanted to drive my car into a tree more than once. Those guys will be replaced with a machine. The rest have nothing to worry about. The people described in the article are clearly far above anything machines will be able to do in the foreseeable future. Their professional work is closer to that of a theater actor than it is to reading the book.

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