Plus, the narrator does a great job of pronouncing names with a french accent (at least, it sounds legit to me, a non-french speaking person). I wonder how a computer voice would do with speaking English with a distinct French accent. Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?
On a similar note, Sanderson's own books in "graphic audio" format (multiple voice actors, sound effects, music, etc) are a wonderful piece of art and is my preferred way to consume audiobooks when possible. I don't see that being replaced with AI any time soon.
If you can get a synthesized voice to speak French in a French accent, you can also get it to speak English in a French accent. That part's easy.
> Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?
For this, I assume you'd just annotate each word.
I think what actually happened is that they convinced Amazon that there was more money in audiobooks than they thought, and it wasn't worth using it as a feature to sell kindles. Now Amazon knows how much money is in audiobooks and they aren't sharing. Are they surprised?
Copilot and chatgpt are going to replace me, so I say this with all humility, don't protect jobs from AI. They are saving us effort we can spend on other things. This is just industrialization taken another step.
This is true on a long time scale. On a medium-to-short time scale it will lead to the biggest concentration of wealth we've ever seen.
Human narrators do things like use different inflection depending on who’s speaking.
It's all possible but I doubt it'll be here in 10 years.