@masukomi I don't think I would go that far, as with everything there's nuance, the Voice/TTS service you pick will have a massive effect on how the book will end up coming across. Overall though I agree, audible is for audiobooks, if I want AI generated stuff I will use a TTS service.
@ZBennoui there is an important nuance here that I think is being missed. It’s not about the question of artificially generated audio useful.
The question is, would you ever choose artificially generated text professionally recorded voice actor (when available) - assuming everything else is the same?
@masukomi Counterpoint: If I want to listen to a non-fiction book that hasn't been produced as an audiobook by a human narrator, I'd rather listen to a machine-generated version through the Audible app, with support for background playback and so on, than read it with VoiceOver in the Kindle app. I suspect that the major DRM-encumbered ebook providers deliberately limit the capability to read ebooks with text-to-speech so as not to be too competitive with audiobooks.
@masukomi Of course, with the new machine-generated audiobooks, I suspect the publisher is still getting as much money as they would from a human-narrated audiobook. But so be it, if it increases the availability of audiobooks, particularly for non-fiction. Anyway, I've listened to plenty of human-narrated non-fiction audiobooks that were less than stellar performances; a machine would have done as well if not better.
@matt I agree about all the technical features you listed as being good things. However, why would you ever choose an artificially generated reading of the text that is guaranteed to get the internation wrong in sentences, and make other similar errors when you could have the same book read to you by a human narrator who gets it right and helps to convey the meaning of the text more clearly, and without introducing cognitive dissonance from misreading?
@masukomi That assumes that the human reader that one would actually get, particularly for low-budget productions, is always better than current-generation text-to-speech. I listened to some bad readings when listening to textbooks on tape in school.
@masukomi Then again, some of my textbooks were read by good readers. I especially remember my English literature book in my senior year of high school. That book had a brief passage of The Canterbury Tales in the original middle English. Text-to-speech would have absolutely butchered that, but the volunteer reader who did that book for Recording for the Blind did a good job, so much so that my teacher asked me to play the passage for the whole class.
@matt@masukomi I just use an actual #kindle with #voiceview because that does work as it should, and I have not once found a #book on kindle that does not work with it.
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