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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Whoever sells audiobooks….. make a big deal of using human readers.

Good human readers are much, much better than any AI (and much much better than non professional readers).

I buy a lot of audiobooks and it really really matters who they narrator is.

If I found out an audiobook is AI read then I’ll not buy it..,,, not now nor in the future when TTS improves. I want to support good narrators.

Project Gutenberg is making a huge mistake going this hard with AI. They should double down on people and find a way to get more people doing better reads.

All this AI and TTS audiobooks just makes me steer clear of Gutenberg because it’s got to be a huge pile of low quality trash now.

Support human narrators. Say no to AI.

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This sounds just like the “use native not electron” arguments to me. Yes, native (human) is better but if the app wouldn’t exist at all without electron (ai), I’ll pick electron.

If Gutenberg gets human narrators for books then that’s great, for the rest using AI doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

Heck, there are 3 books in a series I love (Honor Harrington, first 2 and especially the last one in the Shadow of Saganami series) that have a different narrator from all the mainline series and they bad (I cannot stress enough how bad the narrator for book 4 in the spinoff is). I’d love nothing more than to train an AI on the other books and generate new narrations for those 3 books. Heck I’d pay Allison Johnson $100+ per book for her to re-narrate them if that was an option but I seriously doubt it is with copyright BS and trying to crowdfund something like that. So in the absence of getting what I’d like, and what I’d pay for, I’d gladly turn to “AI”.

Not sure I agree. I listened to a handful of the books that MS encoded. I would not be able to listen to a full book like that. It's just not quite right - the timing is fixed and while the words are correctly pronounced and each have the right accent, there's a lack of natural emphasis on certain words within each sentence that makes if feel cold and alien. I admit this is miles ahead of any previous text-to-speech I've heard, and would be good for reading, say, a blog post or article, but not a full book. At least not fiction. I read fiction for enjoyment and agree that the narrator makes the difference. I've stopped listening to several audiobooks because the narrator didn't cut it for me.

I'll watch this space and reevaluate, but I wouldn't listen to any of this batch.

Couldn't agree more. Let's also not forget that many people can't actually read for various reasons, such as visual , physical, learning disabilities. Free AI narration is a huge thing for all these people, even if the quality is not perfect. Anything that encourages people to consume more books and build empathy with other humans by experiencing different viewpoints has to be a good thing, right?

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