101–110 of 195 posts
I cannot listen to audiobooks read by text to speech they sound awful. Only human narrators are acceptable.
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Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify). If you’re not willing to go even with that in order to listen to an actual human, then maybe yeah, you can try AI.
> Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify) Not true at all. Audible Plus gives you access to a tiny subset of the full library, the rest (which includes all the best titles) need to be purchased separately.
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> Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is happy." Everything is not amazing. Sure things are amazing from a technical perspective. But most tech advancements I think have been harmful to society in the last 30 years or so. Its awesome that computers are so powerful and we have awesome video and photos and can share things so easily. But technology should better lives, and not cheapen it, which it oft…
I forget the exact quote but the thing I've seen making the rounds sums it up pretty well: Computers were supposed to do the work so people could make art and write poetry. Now the computers are making art and writing poetry and I still have to have a job. In another life I'd love to do voice over work. (I even have a face for radio!) But, instead, technology is being used to avoid even having humans do that type of…
Once purchasing power has evaporated, then and only then will the system change.
Alternatively AI will also replace the jobless.
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> Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify) Not true at all. Audible Plus gives you access to a tiny subset of the full library, the rest (which includes all the best titles) need to be purchased separately.
Unless things have changed since I was a subscriber, you get a token every month which can be used to purchase any book from the full library. So its effectively 1 book a month + a few extras bonuses for $7.95
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I forget the exact quote but the thing I've seen making the rounds sums it up pretty well: Computers were supposed to do the work so people could make art and write poetry. Now the computers are making art and writing poetry and I still have to have a job. In another life I'd love to do voice over work. (I even have a face for radio!) But, instead, technology is being used to avoid even having humans do that type of…
It will probably all fall apart when there is no one left to purchase this stuff, no job, no money, no purchasing power. Once purchasing power has evaporated, then and only then will the system change. Alternatively AI will also replace the jobless.
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I was going to mention ElevenLabs, too. Their samples are very impressive in how the intonation and word stress are varied based on the text’s meaning. Their pricing is a bit high for personal use, though. (The link you posted seems to have been truncated. Can you try posting it again?)
Yeah, sadly it'd cost about $100 to get a book per month... Not quite competitive with Audible yet, but give it a year perhaps, or a few iterations of the open source models... (fixed the link)
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I forget the exact quote but the thing I've seen making the rounds sums it up pretty well: Computers were supposed to do the work so people could make art and write poetry. Now the computers are making art and writing poetry and I still have to have a job. In another life I'd love to do voice over work. (I even have a face for radio!) But, instead, technology is being used to avoid even having humans do that type of…
It will probably all fall apart when there is no one left to purchase this stuff, no job, no money, no purchasing power. Once purchasing power has evaporated, then and only then will the system change. Alternatively AI will also replace the jobless.
There’s a long, long way to go for AI to learn emotion before I’d spend 20+ hours listening to a book read by one.
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AI might dominate, but it would be a loss. Here’s a tutorial explaining modern audio fiction: https://www.drabblecast.org/2018/07/30/inside-drabblecast-au... (In audio format, of course; roughly 1.5 hours) ———— This episode takes you inside Drabblecast audio production. Ever wonder how we produce an episode of the Drabblecast? Wonder no more! We dig into all the technical aspects like voice acting, sound editing and…
It might be worse than human narration, but at some point the economics becomes so loopsided that it's dominance is inevitable. One good thing I can see coming out of that will be an abundance of audiobooks of copyright expired books.
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> Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is happy." Everything is not amazing. Sure things are amazing from a technical perspective. But most tech advancements I think have been harmful to society in the last 30 years or so. Its awesome that computers are so powerful and we have awesome video and photos and can share things so easily. But technology should better lives, and not cheapen it, which it oft…
I forget the exact quote but the thing I've seen making the rounds sums it up pretty well: Computers were supposed to do the work so people could make art and write poetry. Now the computers are making art and writing poetry and I still have to have a job. In another life I'd love to do voice over work. (I even have a face for radio!) But, instead, technology is being used to avoid even having humans do that type of…
> Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and save money?" and not "how can people have better lives and work less?"
It's not just AI, but technology generally. And it's because when it comes to managing people, organizations for the most part don't actually concern themselves with getting their employees to produce value—that is, whether they are, and how much, and at what cost (to the business) it comes at, and where that measure of productivity lies (objectively) when scored against some rubric. Instead what they make their most immediate concern is whether their employees are exposed to sufficient toil. Look at any example that involves someone accepting a new job with a set of work duties/expectations where they proceed to automate part of their workload and thus provide the same value (or more) in comparison to what they were doing before, or in comparison to their coworkers, or in comparison to whomever would have ended up with the job if the person who did accept and automate it had accepted an offer elsewhere instead: they end up soliciting feedback (or opining themselves) about whether what they're doing is unethical.
This is the mechanism that wealth disparity through concentration of wealth comes from, but everyone (the employer and the employee alike) walks around as if they either don't notice it or—if they do—as if it's wrong when there's a known path for the concentration to flow upward but it isn't happening.