This is trending into the uncanny valley where instead of sounding like a really good TTS system it sounds like an absent-minded half-illiterate cretin reading a script. Not sure that's a step in the right direction.
Isn't it? You have to enter the uncanny valley before you cross it. The fact that this is in it means that it no longer triggers our "this isn't a person" response, and instead triggers our "this is a lazy person" one.
>You have to enter the uncanny valley before you cross it.
—comment of the year
I'd be honored if the year wasn't 12 hours old :(
I already use TTS to listen to e-pulp fiction books, which is something a lot of people wouldn't put up with, but I could easily listen to books narrated by any of those sample voices, especially if it switched between distinct styles for each character without changing the voice. But that would still probably require human work to tag the dialogue with the right characters.
Absolutely. But nothing a simple "in an enthusiastic style" in the prompt won't fix, that's how AI works right? :P
You perhaps joke, but I suspect the combination of large text models to work out the subtext, and still fairly simple TTS models to render audio with a variety of emotional tones, is going to be very powerful in the future.