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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a few years at Audible as a dev. Based on my experience, I'd say the culture at the company was good, in that we were not trying to exploit people, neither externally nor internally.

One thing that was pretty clear was that our audiobooks were at the mercy of publishing houses / content owners, and a lot of restrictions came from licensing deals (geographic reastrictions, time-based, formats, etc), so I'm inclined to assume that the low cut for authors may be due to publishers wanting a big cut of the sales.

That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor, so there could have been a whole other side to this company that I was not exposed to.

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I still remember when the kindle first came out, it would read to you. Before publishers threatened to sue. With modern text to speech getting so good, there really is no reason an inference model couldn't run on every device to read to us. I guess book readers were the first to have their jobs replaced by AI, but contracts didn't let it happen.

It wasn't publishers, it was the Author's Guild, the union representing voice talent for audiobooks. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/...

I like Neil Gaiman's quote in there, and I agree if you record someone reading a book you can copyright that, but that copyright has no bearing on the copyright status of the recording of a another person or machine reading the book. If I own the content, I can format shift, that is actually in law in the US. Audio is a format.

I think what actually happened is that they convinced Amazon that there was more money in audiobooks than they thought, and it wasn't worth using it as a feature to sell kindles. Now Amazon knows how much money is in audiobooks and they aren't sharing. Are they surprised?

Copilot and chatgpt are going to replace me, so I say this with all humility, don't protect jobs from AI. They are saving us effort we can spend on other things. This is just industrialization taken another step.

> don't protect jobs from AI. They are saving us effort we can spend on other things. This is just industrialization taken another step.

This is true on a long time scale. On a medium-to-short time scale it will lead to the biggest concentration of wealth we've ever seen.

Really not nearly as close as you’re implying.

Human narrators do things like use different inflection depending on who’s speaking.

That is probably easily possible with a bit of engineering.. Can't be too hard to figure out who's speaking with some NLP?

In 2007 the state of playback was pitiful. Of course the authors guild saw the trend lines, but even in 2022, we know Siri/Alexa don't sound human at all (my pre-teens make fun of them).

It's all possible but I doubt it'll be here in 10 years.

There’s also a huge difference between acceptable for a few sentences (Alexa) and acceptable for hours and hours.

They sound non human by design.

Chat gpt can already parrot back some idea to you in the written "voice" of any famous historical figure you care to name, and remembers context from earlier in your session to inform its written inflection as well. Presumably this implies we have "line of sight" to doing something analogous in the audio space, at least in this generation. Certainly if you fed a whole book into chat gpt that it had never read before and asked it to describe the intonation of a character's voice it would have some level of accuracy (e.g. "husky" vs "meek") so I think we would want to do something similar for the AI reading. It could also probably pick up on context in what it's reading and read it with emotion.

My worry is that you could do something 60% as good for 1% of the cost, at which point a well-narrated audiobook becomes an extreme luxury good. Most people will pay $5-$10 for the "good enough" algorithmic version, and there aren't enough people who care to pay the fixed cost of Michael Kramer doing a version.

I don’t know. I’ve been listening to an unabridged audiobook of the Count of Monte Cristo. The single narrator has done a fantastic job of giving a different voice to every single character. Even if a particular character hasn’t appeared for tens of hours, when they do reappear, I remember who they are from their unique voice.

Plus, the narrator does a great job of pronouncing names with a french accent (at least, it sounds legit to me, a non-french speaking person). I wonder how a computer voice would do with speaking English with a distinct French accent. Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?

Absolutely. There's a world of difference between a professional voice actor narrating an audiobook, and AI/amateur. Personally I can't listen to anything narrated by anyone other than (good) pro voice actors, it just kills the enjoyment.

On a similar note, Sanderson's own books in "graphic audio" format (multiple voice actors, sound effects, music, etc) are a wonderful piece of art and is my preferred way to consume audiobooks when possible. I don't see that being replaced with AI any time soon.

This is my favorite book, I'm due for a reread(listen). Who's the narrator?

Bill Homewood

> I wonder how a computer voice would do with speaking English with a distinct French accent. Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?

If you can get a synthesized voice to speak French in a French accent, you can also get it to speak English in a French accent. That part's easy.

> Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?

For this, I assume you'd just annotate each word.

The kindles made in the last 5 years or so have this feature again, called voiceview

> That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor

Is it just me or is this nuts? The only time I've seen restricted access is when there are security concerns (national security, special equipment, etc).

I've often wished it were the other way around. Engineering was a floor that sales weren't allowed into without special invite. I've had two good experiences with open floor plans, but the open floor was spacious and dedicated to development. The one bad experience we shared the open floor with sales and they were... loud.

I once worked in an open office shared with sales. At some point the decision was made to put up a wall to segregate the engineers from sales.

I was sad about that; listening to sales had reminded me of my grandmother.

I liked my grandparents as well. I wouldn't want them chatting loudly, cheering or taking phone calls next to my desk while I'm working, though.

> listening to sales had reminded me of my grandmother.

Why?

The sales team was largely Mexican-American, and sometimes they would imitate their own grandmothers.

Well in this case, these are self-published audio-books so it can't be the publisher.

What does that have to do with indie authors not attached to big publishers, though?

And why would big publishers be able to dictate payment terms to unaffiliated indie authors? sounds like illegal price fixing if true.

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