Interestingly, I know several people what would like AI to read stuff to them and read it to them in an interesting way (not Hal-9000 ish)
One friend wants conference papers turned into audio.
Another wants fan-fiction read dramatically.
One friend wants conference papers turned into audio.
Another wants fan-fiction read dramatically.
So in book, as you mention, an author will be able to define the full experience - and AI will allow people to select the stories and movie experience they want on demand.
Yeah there's a bunch of movies/show I'm not interested in watch but fascinated by aftershow content, i.e. all the game of thrones podcasts/recaps. It's interesting the variety you can get in a 5 minute recap, a 20 minute one, or a 2 hour one. There's alot of mid movies out there that I'm satisified with just the recap. Ditto with all the channels summarizing entire seasons of TV shows. I'm just waiting for a selectable X minute recap/summary/synopsis slider for content. Bonus choosing how recap is done, i.e. I really like game of throne wiki because it feels more like history book with drama stripped out / toned down.
ALSO DISCLAIMER on my gaming history: [0]
"Give me an FPS that I can launch on UE5 (installed) that will yank the world assets from [MOVIE] and allow me to play as [CHARACTER] and include the mechanics of [STEALTH] [D&D 52 rules] and skin it as [ANIME-THING] - and use the [GAME] as reference - but give it to me as a tower defence webapp""
[0] - First ever gamer on unreal, AGP, Celeron, etc...
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Imagin walking into a game test lab and barking "Give me the latest build of X game on Y engine on Z console"
And having that exp route...
This is off the-cuff thinking outloud about a concept I cannot articulate properly, but the attempt;
>>I'm just waiting for a selectable X minute recap/summary/synopsis slider for content.
Use the depth of the tools allowed us at this point, and they are FN deep.
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Hear me out:
Using AI to craft AI in order to Feed ourselves knowledge in the most compact, pragmatic and efficient manner.
BingeKnowledgeAsASynapse.injector.
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Many people consume vid/pod/aud/wtd at 2x speed. I frequently run 2x and then you just <-- whenever you need to in order to recap a point should you meander down all the paths.
I want to craft a funnel of information and be able to tell the AI to teach me THING -- I've some up with a nascient framework for this - which is effectively a scaffold (think BootStrap) for getting Robots to do a bidding.
I tried this by getting Claude to write the text (based on the pdf) and then putting that into elevenlabs for audio (quite expensive) and for what it's worth that worked quite great.
But what you described for reading scientific papers sounds very interesting. Maybe someone can suggest alternatives?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/years-after-its-audm-acqui...
It uses a reverse engineered API from MS Edge to use the more premium MS voices for free. A bit of a grey area, but it works remarkably well.
It's so painful when there is a book I am really excited to listen to and find that I just can't. Maybe I just mentally drop out mid-sentence or the words float past without carrying any meaning and it can be difficult to pin down why.
One aspect is the performance. An accent or an intonation can cause a nails on blackboard type revulsion. A morose, monotone or bored voice, ugh? For example, I just can't do any Scott Brick performance (which is pretty annoying given how prolific he is) because he trails off every sentence in this weird pitch change that doesn't match how any normal person speaks. It causes me this distressing mental dissonance because it's so disconnected to the passage being read. I suspect it's a result of him just reading out words blind and not talking like a human trying to communicate specific meanings and feelings.
This is also the problem with robot voices - the difference between a joke, a question, an assertion, a doubt, sarcasm or self-delusion can all be in the intonation. With text you might pause and revoice a passage to catch a meaning but the conveyor belt of audio means the next words are upon you giving no chance for reflection. The place where I can handle a robot voice is when using it with the text in front of me. I quite like it as a pace setter. I still have my own internal voice giving flavour but gain some reading endurance when tired or the material is boring/dry and I keep mentally wandering off.
The other aspect is the style of writing - some writing is delightful to read but awful to listen to. The parameters includes everything from sentence structure to vocabulary. A simple example is lists: perfect for quickly imbibing visually but can be maddening to hear read out. Same with numbers, or parentheticals or footnotes or... so I generally can't listen to anything technical.
The most listenable things for me is anything in a conversational style. However, even dialogue dominated works can be torture when they use certain patterns of "he said"/"she said" directions that are effectively punctuation and silent when we read but overwhelming when voiced. A first-person diary style often fits with being spoken without changes. There is a probably an AI opportunity to rewrite books to more resemble radio plays that work better as voice performances.
IMHO voicing technical works needs some brand new ideas. Real life conference talks that just narrate their paper are torture to sit through. Successfully engaging speakers use personality, humour, anecdotes and structure talks playfully with setup/reveals, hypotheticals, pauses for thought and have all sorts of rhetorical tricks to bring drama to the driest content.
But yes, there are some professional narrator that I am baffled as to how they get paid to narrate other audiobooks because they just cannot convey the story. It is such a disappointment when, as you mentioned, you are excited about a book and you run into one of those narrators.