This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.
There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it’s impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
There are thousands of books released every year. That’s impossible to cover even in English alone.
Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.
In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.
dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
I’m pretty sure they’d be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
Sure but that’s not how free markets work. If there’s only 3 million consumers you can’t afford 3 million voice actors but you can afford 3 million AI renders.
I’m not an economist but… 1 voice actor can serve 3 million consumers if they listen to the same content.
Anyway that’s not even my point, my point is that it is possible to cover, we as a society, driven both by VC with strategies of capturing markets (so precisely going against “free” market as an ideal) and consumers are making choices (like when one buys from the local farmer market vs Amazon deliveries). If though we, while fully understanding the consequence of such choice (namely how the sausage is made, here how AI models are trained and then run), believe it’s not valuable then sure, we can make that choice.
I’m just warning consumers then that if they don’t pay for quality content made a certain way, they can’t complain that they in turn don’t get the job they wanted because nobody out there is ready to pay for it.
This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.
There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it’s impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
There are thousands of books released every year. That’s impossible to cover even in English alone.
Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.
In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.
I’m pretty sure they’d be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
Sure but that’s not how free markets work. If there’s only 3 million consumers you can’t afford 3 million voice actors but you can afford 3 million AI renders.
I’m not an economist but… 1 voice actor can serve 3 million consumers if they listen to the same content.
Anyway that’s not even my point, my point is that it is possible to cover, we as a society, driven both by VC with strategies of capturing markets (so precisely going against “free” market as an ideal) and consumers are making choices (like when one buys from the local farmer market vs Amazon deliveries). If though we, while fully understanding the consequence of such choice (namely how the sausage is made, here how AI models are trained and then run), believe it’s not valuable then sure, we can make that choice.
I’m just warning consumers then that if they don’t pay for quality content made a certain way, they can’t complain that they in turn don’t get the job they wanted because nobody out there is ready to pay for it.
2 sides of the same coin.
but for a service like audible.