Adrian Cochrane
Hearing objections to Apple machine-generating audiobooks, allow me to share my thoughts as someone who toys with the technology:
For the sake of visually impaired people it is vital to have technology that can render texts in auditory fonts, not just visual fonts. For all digitized writing to be accessible to them, not just those publishers find it valuable to pay a narrator to read.
However it is wrong to advertise this as being akin to an audiobook, good narrators bring much more!
1/2
Adrian Cochrane
The thing I keep finding is that there's a dichotemy in speech synthisis I'd rather didn't exist: You can either have an expressive voice (though they're rarely used that way) or one which sounds human.
A good narrator reinforces the meaning of the text with their tone-of-voice, this is what I call "expressiveness".
To get that synthetic expressiveness you need to heavily annotate your text (more common on the web, as opposed to books), and even then not capture the nuance of a human.
2/2
Adrian Cochrane
To rephrase: Currently with voice synthesis either your books will sound either dull or robotic.
Even if my dreams come true & this dichotemy disappears it'll still take a large ammount of human effort to even approach the level of nuance a talented human narrator brings. In many cases it'd take more effort!
3/2
Adrian Cochrane
@pettter Nice!
pettter
@alcinnz In Sweden, if a disability prevents you from reading a text, you have the right to request it be read into a recording for you, which is then saved for other people's used.
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