I have used Siri to read webpages and text files for me. Without genuine human experience and emotion behind the voice it's not very involving, but as long as the audio didn't glitch it was tolerable for short documents.
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AI-Narrated Audiobooks Now Available in Apple Books
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Very impressive. It would be great to use this technology to have a PDF converted to an audiobook. Does anyone know if there is such a service out there? I do see some text to speech apps, but the monthly cost seems high.
You can do that using the TTS already in macOS.
Highlight the text you want converted, then Right click > Services > Add to Music as a Spoken Track.
Terrible they are utilizing this. Sure, it can be done but think of all the wonderful voice artists who lose out.
It would be nice if Apple were more competitive with [audio]books. Audible is all that's keeping me from deleting my Amazon account. Granted, both Apple and Amazon have been involved with Audible since close to its inception.
Wow this will be great. I love book but don’t have time to sit down and read anymore. I’ve been using Audible to keep up on my “reading”.
These new voices do a much better job of reading the text in a more natural manner.
The new Siri ones sound about the same. I'm impressed with them, but they do glitch out.
Exactly. It would've been a nice built-in feature of the Books app.
'Madison' sample voice was nice but the rest were too robotic. Paying for these? No way.
Excellent post. More people should understand deep learning/machine learning and chatbots aren't 'intelligent', though they are intelligently engineered by people.
Below is a recent example of how ChatGPT failed in a real world scenario to provide mental health support because...
"Once people learned the messages were co-created by a machine, it didn’t work. Simulated empathy feels weird, empty. Machines don’t have lived, human experience so when they say “that sounds hard” or “I understand”, it sounds inauthentic."
This is the same issue AI-narrated books have. If the AI-narrator doesn't really understand or empathize with the words they are reading then the listener might not have an emotional connection with the reader and the text. Nevertheless, they are still useful especially for people who need a screen reader.
Read up on artificial neural net. The processing and memory requirements is enormous.
Most of the stuff that gets passed off as AI is just clever algorithm. Feed it data outside what the algorithm can handle and it gives garbage replies.
I have. Nothing about that tech is remotely intelligent. I'm not saying that it's not an interesting technique, and that it might be on the right track for emulating what brains do, but the existing tech shows no sign of being anywhere near natural brains in capability or complexity.
That could be pretty cool, or at least interesting.I’d be up for an AI powered Radio-Play, especially if they can factor in Spatial Audio.The HHGTTG Radio series is what I’m thinking about.
I’m guessing some of the words in fantasy and science fiction would give the current system fits! And for mysteries and thrillers, they’d have to tune it for long strings of open ended questions and perhaps some whispering.
But I'd say it reinforces my instinct that the more inventive it is, and the more it leverages modern technology, the less it will turn out to be considered something within the appreciated and particular medium of the human-narrated audiobook.
Yeah, there’s nothing enabled by tech that will ever be free of gatekeeping. The market will decide whether or not it’s profitable for the practitioners.