20,858 Public Domain Audio Books

I really love librivox for what they've done and their mission, so please don't interpret this as a criticism. It simply is what it is, and I appreciate all the effort people have graciously donated to make life better and information more accessible for their fellow humans.

That said, the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable. For those, an AI voice narrator would be much better, even with the current state of TTS. Is anybody working on an effort to produce these works with an AI voice?

I think we're at least near the point where it's better to get the text and feed it to an AI reader app, that can be customized in various dimensions, like actor(s) and pace.

I have some favorite audio book narrators, like Patrick Tull, Stephan Fry and Stefan Rudnicki. Sure I'd rather have them read for me, but I'm not going to be able to afford that. I maybe could afford for their licensed AI mimic to read it, and that is an improvement over many random amateur contributors. With AI "personalities" it may become as simple as "have personality X read me text file Y, moderato".

Also it would be great to be able to conversationally control the narration. "Pause, hey what does that big word mean, go back two sentences and restart, stop, who is this Watson guy?, ok keep reading but adagio."

It is not just about the having a good voice, whilst that is important, you also need voice acting skills to show in the voice, as in a good voice actor would change their accent, tone, language, style for every character and seed it with emotion and so forth. A lot of thought (and skill) goes into it[1]

Stephen Fry is good for audio books because he is a talented voice actor amongst his many other skills. Attenborough is a treasure and known for his audio work, but he is not a voice actor - or at least doesn't do that kind of work which requires lot more range rather than one specific one we all recognize. I wouldn't like his voice style to narrate a fiction book for me.

A planned production with editing and nuanced prompting even with just AI voice actors will still vastly better for immersion than just an app doing it real time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@tawnyplatis7866/shorts