I just listened to this AI generated audiobook and if it didn’t say it was AI, I’d have thought it was human-made. It has different voices, dramatization, sound effects… The last I’d heard about this tech was a post saying Stephen Fry’s voice was stolen and replicated by AI. But since then, nothing, even though it’s clearly advanced incredibly fast. You’d expect more buzz for something that went from detectable as AI to indistinguishable from humans so quickly. How is it that no one is talking about AI generated audiobooks and their rapid improvement? This seems like a huge deal to me.
The books I specifically mentioned are now public domain as they are old enough and librevox is where I actually started my audiobook (and books in general) journey. One of them is on there but it is only the second book of what is a 5 or more book series which is kinda frustrating.
The volunteer readers are very hit and miss however and I find that more than half are just not listenable for me due to different reasons from poor actual recordings, poor reading ability by the reader with excessive pauses added “errs and ummms” to mispronunciation of words constantly. These are pedantic reasons maybe and I throw no shade over it to the people that have volunteered their time to read these books but I just can’t listen to them personally for the same reason I could never get through any amount of time with a robotic text to speech program of the past.
I’ll look into the project Gutenberg thing however, thanks for making me aware of it and see what is up with that :)