AI Used To Narrate E-books in Authors' Voices (bbc.com) 31
Chinese search engine Sogou is creating artificial-intelligence lookalikes to read popular novels in authors' voices. From a report: It announced "lifelike" avatars of Chinese authors Yue Guan and Bu Xin Tian Shang Diao Xian Bing -- created from video recordings -- at the China Online Literature+ conference. Last year, Sogou launched two AI newsreaders, which are still used by the government's Xinhua news agency. Appetite for audiobooks in China is on the rise, mirroring trends in the West. Chinese think tank iiMedia expects the market to more than double between 2016 and 2020, to 7.8bn Chinese yuan ($1.1billion) a year. It is now a simple process to use text-to-speech technology to quickly generate an audio version of a book, using digitised, synthetic voices. But most people prefer audiobooks that are "professionally narrated" by authors, actors or famous public figures.
Older books (Score:2)
That would be great if you can do it with any author, provided you have a sampling of his / her voice.
There are several books which have not audio version which I would love to hear. Previously I would have just read them, but since I had a child, my only free time is during my commute, which I dedicate to listening to audio books.
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When does this stop being authentic and become as racist as the old Hollywood portrayals of Asians?
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Re: Older books (Score:3)
Can you imagine it read in Rodney Dangerfields voice?
Super cool if we can pick the voice.
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"Can you imagine it read in Rodney Dangerfields voice?"
You wouldn't get no respect, though.
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The artificial voices are good enough now, it's the ability of the system to understand what it is saying that is the issue. At the moment it has to be done manually, e.g. if you ask Google Assistant for a joke the intonation on the punchline has been added manually.
If ebook data formats had a bit of metadata to describe the tone that something should be read in, and perhaps identify things said by different characters so the system could do accents for them, they could rival audiobooks.
The metadata could e
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But why would you want to hear the exact voice of the original author? There's a reason they get professional voice actors and people with famous/great voices to read audio books. Many authors just don't have that great of voices. I remember listening to a fantastic memoir and autobiography once. The reader had an engaging voice and did a great job reading, which really matters for a book that's 13-20 hours long. At the end of the book they had a segment where the author read a sort of addendum to the
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Other uses? (Score:3)
Your boss's voice describing all the way your are an amazing employee.
Your ex explaining how stupid they were to leave you.
Someone you never got closure with saying they are sorry.
Excellent! (Score:2)
I ... always want ... Kirk ... mode!
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James Earl Jones.
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Compromise: James Earl Kirk:
"Spock ... I am, your ...... father!"
Feeling? (Score:2)
Yes, of course, they will be able to copy the voice, even probably the accent. But reading a dramatic work requires intonation, feeling, sentiment that I really really don't expect an automated AI to (yet) be able to represent.
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You could have a person read it and then compare that to a historical reading by Vincent Price, and mimic his expression and intonation.
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Right. So this development is only about getting the right envolving sound pattern to sound as the author, but not about making material more accessible without needing to pay for a professional reader.
In any case - This might be useful for some cases. But it is IMHO basically a misuse of resources.
FWIW, maybe some people think authors' voices are best qualified to read their books... But authors chose to write them! Not every author has a great voice. It just makes you feel "more complete"..?
Big "meh" from
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Well, not necessarily a professional. The AI may have a more-difficult time interpreting the language and the emotional meaning behind it and thus rendering a presentation than it would interpreting a human being attempting to convey emotional meaning. The AI could conceivably learn to express emotional meaning well, and require a human to guide it along--so the human reader is kind of crap, but it's enough for the AI to do the job much better.
In other words: audiobook narration is now a minimum-wage j
Authors are usually the worst readers (Score:4, Insightful)
Every audiobook that I've listened to, when read by the author, has been terrible. There's a lot of nuance and context in a professional reader's voice. No AI will be able to reproduce that.
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Authors makes or breaks the story (Score:2)
Exactly this. There have been some wonderful books that were just ruined for me as I could not get the horrible voice of the narrator out of my head.
Several which I have returned after about 4 minutes, then.. nope.
Then again, even a relatively poor book can be saved by a talented narrator.
Anything Narrated by R.C. Bray is something I will listen to. He is fantastic.
Re: Authors are usually the worst readers (Score:2)
Maybe they can hire a cheap professional reader and use AI to turn their voice into the author's voice. Call it "vo-cap" instead of "mo-cap".
Actually what would be even better is if they could identify each block of text belonging to each character and give them each a different famous actor's voice. The rest could be in the author's voice. And all from one reader.
Deepfake ... (Score:2)
... ebooks.
But you know (Score:2)
Last year, Sogou launched two AI newsreaders, which are still used by the government's Xinhua news agency.
Garbage in, garbage out
Wheel of Time (Score:2)
It would be epic although it would be a sin if it causes the author ot mispronounce character names
Authors? (Score:2)
Why would someone think that people who can write can also read professionally?
They are not the same thing, even if they might know the book better.
I'll take a professional narrator any time.
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Bu Xin Tian Shang Diao Xian Bing (Score:1)
Poor compared to Professional Voice Acting (Score:2)
Professional actors speak each character in their own voice, with a different speaking style. An AI would not be able to do that automatically until it could have complex understanding of characters, plot, and setting. It will be years before AI can replace a good audiobook reading. This is a mediocre stopgap.
Re: Poor compared to Professional Voice Acting (Score:2)
You could have actual different voices, instead of voicings done by a single person.
I mean, I love the old radio plays. Also some newer ones. BBC's Planet B is fantastic. It'd be pretty sweet to have some automatic conversion from print to multiple voices (though, actual conversion to a radio play format would be much more difficult, requiring deeper understanding of context).
Stephen Fry's lament... (Score:2)
Can the AI say "Harry pocketed it"?
Stupid (Score:2)
Who cares about the author's voice? Give me AI generated Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones for every book in existence.