Following a debate on audiobook narration (AI vs. Human) As a narrator & comm studies prof, I have ~opinions~ 😁 Studies indicate that synthetic voices require a higher cognitive load from listeners b/c it lacks what a human voice can encode; imagery & engagement. bit.ly/4jxrn1q 🎧📚 💙📚 #neuroscience - ThreadSky

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melmcreative.bsky.social • 35 days ago

Following a debate on audiobook narration (AI vs. Human) As a narrator & comm studies prof, I have ~opinions~ 😁 Studies indicate that synthetic voices require a higher cognitive load from listeners b/c it lacks what a human voice can encode; imagery & engagement. https://bit.ly/4jxrn1q
🎧📚 💙📚 #neuroscience

Comments

quasar.axismundi.social•35 days ago

Certainly you need to pay more attention to changing characters as AI narration doesn’t do that. And dialog tends to lack emotion. At least in my experience. Though some are better than others.

melmcreative.bsky.social•34 days ago

Yes, it continues to improve. You can point to affordability and accessibility as positives. But I'm horribly biased (as a voice actor AND a listener). The neurocognitive piece is what I don't think many consider.

quasar.axismundi.social•34 days ago

Yeah. I find some voices from ElevenLabs decent enough.Though my preference is way more for human readers (hell there's even some professional book narrators I'll pass on so of course machine reading generally isn't listenable for me).

quasar.axismundi.social•34 days ago

But I can see a case for it given the vast amount of text out there that doesn't have audio versions and probably never will. It just seems tricky to balance to encourage human narrated content to flourish whilst also allowing that stuff that isn't viable to have a audio option.

melmcreative.bsky.social•34 days ago

Excellent points

deborah-foster.bsky.social•35 days ago

Hmm, I wonder if this is improved when they use voice actors’ voices to make the AI

melmcreative.bsky.social•35 days ago

Good question. AI is certainly continually improving and at some point, I'm not sure we will be able to tell a difference, but I guess the ? is, will we still know neurocognitively. No voice actors I know are willingly lending their talents, but there is lots of data scraping going on.

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