Why isn't everyone talking about AI generated audiobooks?

A lot of people just aren't aware of how fast AI is moving. AI voices were pretty meh earlier this year. A lot of people working on the audiobook/voice acting scene have been talking about this though.
- I recommend everyone to check the YouTube channel "two minute papers" who have being doing videos about papers on AI for the last 10 years on so to see the accelerated progress AI have. Like 5 years ago those images generating AI looked like LSD infused dreams and now they look almost perfect.
  
  I wish I could watch his videos but the way he talks is awful. It's like some exaggerated evolution of YouTube talk.
  
  I'm only shocked that video isn't better. Diffusion models work like denoising - so you'd figure all the wiggly nonsense between frames would be the first thing to filter out.

Ah yes, Audio AI. I can't wait for this rapidly-approaching future where you literally won't be able to trust the validity of anything your senses tell you anymore
- "Text was never trustworthy."
  -- Abraham Lincoln
  
  Lincoln was a smart man
  
  But up until this point, you see, there has always been one medium that is difficult/expensive enough to convincingly fake that it can reasonably be used as proof that something actually happened. If technology advances to the point where a video of something happening is no more convincing than a text description that it happened, and no other more sophisticated, harder-to-fake medium steps in to replace it...
  I don't want to live in a world where the truth is anything you can convince your friends of, you feel me?
- Imagine the day when people post videos of the president saying literally anything with pitch perfect audio voice synth
  Imagine going to prison for a generated clip of you confessing to a crime.
  
  Once the tech is that good, a recording of your confession will be useless as evidence in court.
  
  Or imagine politicians like Trump saying the most heinous stuff and then denying it saying it's fake or AI. How will people know? You won't even be able to trust your eyes or ears anymore.
  
  Guss we'll have to resort to digital watermarking with personal certificates then.
- Soon the schizophrenics will become neuro-typical
- Alright but hear me out: AI-generated odors
  
  You know some people are just gonna generate that fucking locker room smell, the reek of hormones and axe body spray, to terrorize people
- Tech like this has been available for a number of years, and has most likely already been used against you. It's now getting available for the broader masses, but that might just be a blessing in disguise, since increased awareness will hopefully also make you suspicious of those cases that are already happening.
- There we go, that's the comment i was looking for. Lol
- Have you watched a movie, ever? There have always been special effects trickery.
  
  Yes, but you could tell they weren't real. They still needed real voice actors, real sound design, studios and stages and resources. Anyone with a halfway decent rig can fake shit to a very believable degree. Even with CGI you swear is fantastic, you see its fakeness once the novelty wears off
- Oh no, don't make me become skeptical and critical of my environment. Please anything but that

I want TTS made better with AI so that I won't need huge audiobooks filling up my phone. The epubs that I already have would serve as audiobooks when needed.
- If your phone is rendering TTS on the fly that's probably going to be a drain on battery.
  
  I have frequently used tts for listening to epubs. I have, however, not noticed much battery drain... And it's not as enjoyable as listening to an audiobook read by a narrator you like but it kind of works to a certain extent. So I wish you tts would get better.
- What's TTS?
  
  Text to speech.

As someone who only consumes books in audiobook form this is great news for me, I tried to listen to some automatically generated audio books around 2 years ago and I found them horrible to listen to just because they sounded so off.
I'd love to be able to copy in the text of a book and get actually listenable (is that a proper word?) audiobook out of the other side for some books that will just simply never be recorded by actual people due to being too old / obscure.
I've been wanting to be able to listen to the Pelucidar books for years but they just don't exist in audio format, is there somewhere publically available that I can do this?
- I would guess there is a LOT of work going into each voice. Playing with different parameters and prompts. I don't think it's as simple as just copying the text into a box. Not yet at least :)
  
  That's a good thought there though. Audiobooks could have each character voiced uniquely.
  
  I can hope! With the speed things are developing it may not be too long.
  I haven't played around with or looked into much to do with AI at all but would be willing to put in some time into playing with prompts / parameters if it meant I could eventually create a reliable work flow to create things such as what I mentioned.
  I think I'll have to do some research, I need some more old school hollow earth stories in my life xD
  
  I don't see why you couldn't give a few examples and then grab the dialog of a person in along with their description (or just the whole book) and get the llm to generate the prompt for you
- Just curious, but how come you only consume books in audio format? (Please forgive me if this was rude to ask.)
  
  I can't speak for OP but I do this as well. For me it's because I listen to them on the drive to/from dropping my kids off at school and I'll have it playing while I'm working or playing a game.
  
  Not OP, but I almost exclusively read novels and non fiction via audiobooks. For context, I’m on pace for 70 books this year.
  My main reason for audiobooks is I having a driving commute. Two hours a day round trip. Audiobooks keep me sane in a way that podcasts or music do not. I also do audiobooks when doing chores around the house.
  Second, I struggle to focus on reading a book on my phone. Too many distractions and I think the reading experience is subpar. I do have an eInk reader, but I haven’t charged it in years because it’s easier to do audiobooks.
  Physical books are rare in my home, but that’s a self-reinforcing cycle since I enjoy audiobooks so much.
  
  I like to read books before bed, but need darkness for a while before I have any chance of going to sleep, so me and my wife listen to 45min of audio book a night before going to sleep. Plus when we listen together there is no need to worry about getting ahead of each other and spoiling stuff.
  I read books in other scenarios but that ritual is by the most time I have for reading and the most consistent as well.
  
  Personally I mostly use audio books instead of reading because I get eye strain a lot easier than I used to. I go to an eye specialist for unrelated issues yearly, so it’s not an issue with a wrong lens prescription. It’s not a problem when I’m doing a low attention task where I can look away frequently, but for reading it sucks.
  
  Not rude at all, similar to the other responses people have given but it oa two fold really. Firstly I just don't do well with sitting and reading a book, I get bored very quickly, can't concentrate on what is happening and start re-reading sentences or pages over and over where I am not paying attention properly. Additionally after only a couple of pages it will start putting me to sleep, I guess my attention span is just not sufficient for this form of media.
  As a result I never read any books until I discovered audiobooks and my love for them, I honestly just disregarded books as a form of entertainment and thought they were a waste of time until discovering this way to consumer them which wasn't until I was in my early 30s.
  On top of that I now listen to them mostly at work, I work with industrial machines and the work is repetitive as fuck and having a book to listen to makes the time go a lot faster and in a lot more interesting manner. Consequently I now love books and will listen to between 6 and 10 hours a day and now listen to them when I'm doing things like cooking, cleaning or running when I am not at work.
- Well you can always pay someone to read it for you. Blind people do that.
  Are any of these books public domain? If so the print version could be eligible for inclusion at Project Guttenberg. PG has very specific docs about eligibility for this. You could probably get a scan from archive.org if you don't have one. You would have to clean up the OCR by hand.
  Then it would eligible to be requested from the volunteer (human) readers who have been pumping out Libra audio books for years at LibriVox.
  Recently I saw Gutenberg has a collab. They are producing and distributing Libre guidebooks generated by AI. I believe I read on one of the pages they have 4000 done. I haven't tried it out but I guess I should.
  Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg's large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.
  I assume this is also a great benefit as fertilizer down at the old AI content farm which is otherwise totally run over with reddit shitposts.
  If anyone tries it let me know how it goes.
  
  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 :)
- I'm pretty sure that Amazon tried to do this with Kindle a few years ago and got sued by book publishers.
  Ahh, it was audible.
  It's only a matter of time though before this sort of thing is ruled on and deals are inked. Open source is already getting pretty far too.
  
  The books I mentioned and had in mind are old enough that they are now public domain and so this issue would not affect them. :)
- I listen to a lot of audiobooks too, but I wouldn't listen to something like this.
  Have you listened to the one OP posted? After a minute I'm sleeping. There's no emotion, no tension, nothing.
  I can't stress enough how bad OP's sounds. Sure, it sounds natural when compared to what technology was capable of some time ago, but it's dead inside.
  Good voice actors bring a book alive. This doesn't.
  
  I hadn't actually when I originally wrote this comment as I wasn't somewhere that I could listen to audio (without being an obnoxious cunt and I won't be one of those people even if the majority of people seem to be OK with it xD)
  However I would agree, I couldn't listen to a whole book with this monotonous drone of a voice, however like you said compared to what was produced by voice to text type systems of the past this is miles ahead and I certainly look forward to the technology progressing to a point where it is listenable for me.
  I agree with good voice actors being essential for enjoyment, I think that is one of the reasons I fell in love with graphic audio productions over the last couple of years.
- Look at the description of the video. It's not automatically generated. He made several voices and narrator and applied it to each character.
  While insanely cool, it's not "put in book here, get audio book there"
  
  Yes I realise that and was over simplifying in this response but as I stated in another comment I would be more than happy to work on prompts for myself if it could generate something satisfactory to listen to.
  The video posted by OP still sounds a bit "dead" so I don't think the tech is quite there yet but it is promising for the future the way it is headed.
- This is a great use for it!

That sounds pretty cool, though I'd be concerned it will suffer from the classic problem of current AI (...and humans, but that's by the by) of confident incorrectness. Like an automatic transmission can miss meanings and types of context that a human will spot, programmatically generating speech can probably mess up punctuation and flow - even the way a human reader sometimes will get part way through a sentence and realise they need to start again for it to come out right.
That said, I can't see it being a big problem for most works, just unfortunate here and there. For once it seems an AI application short on downsides! (Except for the usual economic ones for many people previously trained in the field.)

There was a fairly big 40K lore channel on YouTube with a rather good AI impersonation of David Attenborough's voice and narration style/scripting. However, I just went to check it, yet it must have recently gotten hit with a DMCA and taken down. A shame really. Though I never got into 40K lore before, or the 40K franchise in general, I am a big fan of David Attenborough, and so that ended up really drawing me in to a new literary universe. However, it was a big mistake by the YouTube creator to use the name and photo likeness of Attenborough in the branding, video titles, and thumbnail art on the channel. I think without pushing that line, the AI voice with a clear disclosure could have kept the channel under the legal radar.
https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/17b4t1v/attenborough_lore_shut_down/
https://youtube.com/@AttenboroughLore
From the pinned comments made here, this looks to be the same creators new channel, now using a different voice, no longer based on any one real person:
https://youtube.com/@Scholarslore
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JnbGL8Z6KYg
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/@AttenboroughLore
  https://piped.video/@Scholarslore
  https://piped.video/watch?v=JnbGL8Z6KYg
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Related commentary on the take down:
  https://youtu.be/1-PIhsD987I
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/1-PIhsD987I
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I’ve been getting into audiobooks in a big way recently. This is interesting but somehow seems off to me. Maybe I’ll try listening to one and have my mind changed. We’ll see!

Because it has the potential to become actively harmful to the audiobook industry
- And great for accesibility for people who can not read well.
- why should i care about the audio book industry? The biggest player is Amazon, it doesn't add value to the art form, its just another way to become informed, and the more people who have that ability the better.
  
  Because they are people. There are other options, you don’t have to support Amazon.
- A lot of audiobook voices are harmful to the industry. Plenty of times I've listened to a book for ten minutes and said nevermind because the voice actor was terrible, making wet mouth sounds or their voice was just annoying or the audio quality was terrible.
  
  I love the multi book series where they hire a different narrator for certain books and they end up pronouncing names and places differently than the first narrator.
- I think it is true because if they get the tech right the market could be saturated and voice actors will be in lower demand.
  And the situation is already terrible for these workers. >90% of people buy and consume books via Audible which is owned by Amazon. As I'm sure you can guess there is lots of shady stuff going on. Such as (but not limited to) the "Audiblegate" campaign where workers discovered Amazon was engaging massive systemic wagetheft. As situation which is still ongoing to the best of my knowledge.
  Audiblegate - main website for "audiblegate" campaign
  Audiblegate Campaign: Fair Deal for Rights Holders - The Alliance of Independent Authors
  #Audiblegate: ALLi Campaign Update — Self-Publishing Advice Center from the Alliance of Independent Authors
  The Truth Behind Audible Subscription Earnings (2023) - this page has detailed information including correspondence, spreadsheets etc if anyone really wants to dive in - however it appears to have been republished from another source which I can't identify
  Some further context about Audible:
  Cory Doctorow is a Bestselling Author, but Audible Won't Carry his Audiobooks - talking about the tech side, DRM and so-called Intellectual property

Audiobooks are offputting to me and I strongly prefer to read text, but this seems like a great thing overall for making books more accessible to people. More people experiencing a wider range of books is good.
- Audiobooks have been a great coping mechanism for my ADHD, they've also made me a better driver.
  For the latter, if I listen to my music I definitely feel a bit more aggressive, whereas if it's an audiobook (and I've given myself sufficient room), I'm much more forgiving.
  For the former, I can mix them with menial tasks and it makes them so much more doable.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this AI generated audiobook
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

There are also a few AI sung songs out there that are pretty good. Most of them sound pretty Autotuny, but to some extent, that can be a style. Aura, by Ghost, is a good example. If I didn't know it was ai, I would just think it was autotune.
- Isn't Ghost and Pals just vocaloid? If I'm thinking of the right ghost(the one who's songs get used in fandom animation videos). That's already been a thing for a while.
  
  That song specifically uses Solaria, which markets itself as "AI" but I'll admit I'm not 100% sure that isn't just marketing https://www.eclipsedsounds.com/product-page/solaria-synthesizer-v-ai

Because it's not a new product.

This is amazing. I'm the future, I''d like to try this on old books I've read in the past just to check

It sounds like a generative model to me, but it's probably the best one I've ever heard. Also, thanks for the link! I added it to my listen list!

Personally I don't consume audiobooks so this doesn't affect me at all.
- Ok? So what if you did consume them. Would you have any thoughts then, so that you can actually contribute a meaningful comment to this topic?
  
  The topic was "Why isn't everyone talking about AI generated audiobooks?". Which I answered. Maybe if you spent more time reading yourself you would have comprehended that.

Because they’re shit and shouldn’t exist.
- I'm sympathetic to the view that artists should be paid for their work. Collectively, artists have produced so much, and these tech companies are funnelling all their work into a machine and recycling it into new works, and profiting off that, without any compensation for the people partially responsible for this new reality. I'm also not interested in people who argue "but actually it's not copying that's not how the technology works it's actually a really complic-" yeah I don't care. Without the artists you would have nothing.
  BUT
  Don't confuse the business practices that make this technology a reality with the technology itself. These tools are incredible, and will result in things that could have never existed previously. I just believe we need to have serious conversations about what they mean for our future.
  
  Exactly! I would do unspeakable things for a tool that would let me pop an epub file in and let me tune the voices and audio effects to my liking. I always have some problem or another with the voice actors.