this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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I’m curious enough to try this.
Audiobooks are made or broken by the quality of the narration. It’s not enough to simply narrate written word, the narrator has to “act” as well. Given the quality of other arts engaged by AI I’m going into this skeptical.
Love all works narrated by Kramer, also all the newest Discworld recordings (absolute masterpieces)
I actually just tested this out with a snippet from Small Gods. It still sounds very robotic and, in my opinion, is nowhere near good enough for these books.
The timing between sentences and paragraphs is inconsistent, the intonation for sentences with ellipses is completely wrong, hyphenated sentences are treated as continuous strings, and it can't get names of characters or places remotely close to their intended pronunciation.
It might be fine for reading a news article, but it is nowhere near ready to perform an audiobook.
I never thought there was anything wrong with the first narrations. I hope those aren’t gone for good.
I've never listened to the originals, but I love that 41 books (I think, I'm on eleven now) have been read by the same actors (including Bill Neighy) throughout. Gives a great feeling of continuity. Every time Death speaks without the book hinting I think, "Oh something bad is happening to somebody."
I think the same. I don't think "Ai" would be able to give a correct intonation for each situations
I won't even try. It's not something I want machine to do, I want someone's opinion to go into how a book is narrated.
I had somewhere Asimov's Foundation audiobooks, in Russian, recorded somewhere around 1991, and I don't think a machine can do that.
You should give Ender's Game a listen, the one narrated by Harlan Ellison and Stefan Rudnicki (I borrowed from my local library). The performance is excellent.