• Nangijala
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    11 hours ago

    I prefer listening to real people. No matter how good AI voices become, I still like knowing that the one reading the book to me understands what they are saying.

    • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      I completely agree. I don’t even like it when the human reader clearly doesn’t understand what they’re saying, so some AI flatly telling me the story isn’t going to cut it.

      For the humans, someone mispronounced “quay” for example. “La Jolla” was another standout mistake that took me out of the story.

      • Nangijala
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        59 minutes ago

        Dude, I know how you feel xD back in 2009 I bought an audio recording of the first Twilight book because I was curious about ehat the fuss was about. It was in Danish, as I am Danish, and the narrator, bless her, had a very Danish way of pronouncing the word “flirting”. In Danish we don’t have a modern word for flirting so we just use the English one with English pronunciation, but this lady, who already sounded like she was in her 60s, just went full Dane on that word and it completely took me out of the story and had me yell at my ghettoblaster “FLIRTING” everytime she pronounced her mutilated version of that word. I don’t even know how to write a phonetic version of what the fuck she said, but I’ll try.

        Fleert-eh

        Fuck me, it’s been almost 16 years and just spelling it out made my skin crawl.

        I also hated that book, but that wasn’t really the narrator’s fault. Had to pause the fuck out of it several times and rage clean my apartment. Nobody had told me about how it romanticized abusive relationships and I had JUST gotten out of one of those so to say I was triggered was an understatement. The mispronounciations of flirting were just the garnish on top, lol.

    • But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      The issue is there’s a million books out there with no audio and never will. Im ok with Ai doing readings on books that wouldn’t otherwise get an audio version

      • Nangijala
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        4 hours ago

        Sure, but it is still lame for a company like Audible to expect people to pay for their service and then they decide to cut costs by switching to AI voices. They can afford to hire actors to read their books. They have no excuse to go do that.

        Meanwhile what you’re talking about if books and stories that may not get to be picked to be narrated and well, I can see where ai voices could be a benefit in those cases. Especially for people with dyslexia.

        I just disagree with a company that sells itself on narrated books and then they go and have robots read their shit? Why should anyone pay for that? Because I’m sure their prices wouldn’t go down either.

        And when all is said and done, personally, I just prefer that a human being is reading to me. Especially if it is fiction.

        • But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Does audible actually do the audiobooks? I assumed it was the publishers. Sometimes the books i want aren’t available on audio which I listen to while working

          • Nangijala
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            58 minutes ago

            I assumed they did. Maybe not all, to be fair, but I am pretty sure they have produced audio recordings of books in the past(?)

            Maybe I’m just tripping, I dunno.