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Comment by patentatt | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what the economics are here, because getting someone to just read a book can't possibly be that expensive, right? I'm not talking celebrity voice-over work, but just getting anybody with a passable voice to sit down a spend a day or so reading a book into a microphone? Does that really cost that much more than having someone sit down a listen to the whole AI-generated audio book to do QA? And then there's all of the engineers who have to work on the project, the hardware to run all of it, etc. Seems like if it takes months to do and has to be QA'd anyways, it can't be that much more cost effective. Now, if it's completely computer-generated and can be a push-button feature? Sure, that makes sense. I wonder how close they are to that.

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You need to take into account that nobody can perfectly read a book first time. I've done a reasonable amount of short-fiction narration for audio magazines, and even with many hours worth of script reading under my belt I still fumble every third or forth sentence. So I need to re-read those, and then I (or somebody else) needs to find those errors and edit them out, replacing with the fixed audio. Then people need to listen to the entire file at least once to ensure the whole thing makes sense and I didn't leave out a sentence somewhere or something.

Audiobook narration is one of those things that is remarkably labour intensive, certainly much more than I'd have guessed before getting into it.

This was demonstrated vividly when Andy Serkis read The Hobbit unabridged live for charity then did a separate recording as a commercial release. Both were great, but you could see how many minor flaws were in the live recording that would have had to be re-recorded in the commercial version. (I’ve no idea how long it took to record the Lord of the Rings which he did a year later)

If you're talking about using a trained voice actor, yes, they will cost an hourly rate to do this, which is reflective of the care and training they put into their craft. One should also expect that they don't simply press record, and then do an entire read through. They will go back and try different takes on segments

If we're not talking about a trained voice actor, you may want to look at some thing like LibriVox, which is entirely volunteer run on public domain works, and while the efforts are appreciated, the quality is noticeably different.

As an audible customer I can tell you clearly that I often buy audiobooks by a particular narrator (discovering new authors) because the narrator is so good.

I mean, Siri is quite good at reading texts (I imagine that's a huge training corpus) but I think we'll be in "uncanny valley" for quite a few years.

It's possible that the public just gets used to that.

Same! I remember being really impressed by Justine Eyre in something, and then being a little disappointed to find that 99% of her work is romance novels.

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