171–180 of 244 posts
I also remember reading, a couple of years ago, that Apple was working on improving the voices for Siri - resulting in me thinking "surely Apple has more important things to work on to improve Siri". I guess this was what they were actually aiming for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is that such "digital narration" is on the brink of becoming available as a service to authors and publishers, with Amazon and Apple trying to get ahead of it by selling a product that can only be published on their platforms then. They are surely able to undercut human narration, but even on digital narration they have an unfair advantage of earning a share on every sale as well. Will be interesting to see…
I'm curious what the economics are here, because getting someone to just read a book can't possibly be that expensive, right? I'm not talking celebrity voice-over work, but just getting anybody with a passable voice to sit down a spend a day or so reading a book into a microphone? Does that really cost that much more than having someone sit down a listen to the whole AI-generated audio book to do QA? And then there's…
I mean, Siri is quite good at reading texts (I imagine that's a huge training corpus) but I think we'll be in "uncanny valley" for quite a few years.
It's possible that the public just gets used to that.
I have to say that a number of audiobooks I've bought recently have been totally spoilt by the narration - and the AI voices on offer here all sound better than the humans involved in those books. I also remember reading, a couple of years ago, that Apple was working on improving the voices for Siri - resulting in me thinking "surely Apple has more important things to work on to improve Siri". I guess this was what t…
I would imagine it was the other direction—that this is a way for them to test out their improvements to Siri.
I have to say that a number of audiobooks I've bought recently have been totally spoilt by the narration - and the AI voices on offer here all sound better than the humans involved in those books. I also remember reading, a couple of years ago, that Apple was working on improving the voices for Siri - resulting in me thinking "surely Apple has more important things to work on to improve Siri". I guess this was what t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand that sentence fine, I don't see anything wrong with it.
Writer here, it's a terrible sentence. "I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild." "Deep currents of spiritual yearning" is both cliched and unspecific / unclear. "That" is superfluous. It's unclear how Bill is expressing the beauty he sees, and the sentence structure implies he's somehow responsible for the natura…
> Linda Hale Bucklin made a pact with her husband, Bill, to communicate after death. Here she shares her personal experience and other stories of love and faith in the afterlife.
Bill died after 40 years of marriage.
The rest of the paragraph:
> Bill loved and found solace in nature. Often, we voiced our wonder of the sight of a full moon peeking above the hills of Stinson, rising heavily until it pushed free of the horizon, a perfect circle in the dark sky. On nights with a new moon, we would walk to the end of the beach to find our favorite constellation, the Pleiades. I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writer here, it's a terrible sentence. "I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild." "Deep currents of spiritual yearning" is both cliched and unspecific / unclear. "That" is superfluous. It's unclear how Bill is expressing the beauty he sees, and the sentence structure implies he's somehow responsible for the natura…
Could you do Hemingway, McCarthy and Joyce next? It's untenable they wrote 'unspecific / unclear / superfluous / awkward / anachronistic' language such that our robots cannot render to speech.
The first versions of Amazon's Kindle did this. Then they got mired in lawsuits over it from the book industry.
The "Helena" sample contains a pretty good test case of this system's ability to guess where emphasis and pauses go: > I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild. (I checked in an online sample of the ebook: there is no punctuation in this sentence.) Unfortunately the AI completely faceplants, placing an enormous pau…
The first versions of Amazon's Kindle did this. Then they got mired in lawsuits over it from the book industry.
Also, having the progress sync between digital text book and audio version is a great UX improvement!