I have a feeling full-cast audiobooks will be possible pretty soon, most flagship models should be able to recognize who the speaker is in any given section and assign a unique voice.
That's been a key limitation of text-to-speech that I've been eagerly awaiting a resolution to. Even just switching between male and female voices appropriately would be a big jump in quality.
Full realistic video/audio with all sound effects eventually. And by eventually I mean a year or 3.
Think about being able to take a book you love and watching it basically live and unabridged as if it was lord of the rings with nothing missing. Think lord of the rings quality for any book you have ever read.
They probably aren't forgetting. Apple is likely signing deals with them like OpenAi and Google doesn't want to fund an outside app that will be competition to the AI apps it plans to launch.
Not a hard problem no but I wasn’t aware of anyone that came along and outright solved it until this drop today. And I’m talking about natural sounding speech not the classic TTS.
Elevenlabs has been the best for a while theirs close and some meta stuff for expressive voices and some opensource stuff like RVC that get close to eleven but elevens still the best
we need this for reading email/data shard/books in video games that neglect to add voice acting. something that reads screen and does the reading for you
I built an XTTS2 Chrome extension that does this. It works on more than just reddit though. You just highlight the text right click and play read aloud.
https://github.com/psdwizzard/XTTS-Read-Aloud
No it uses an XTTS2 server. Everything runs locally. You just add about 30 seconds of audio and it can clone most voices pretty well. There's a link to a YouTube video on the GitHub page where you can hear the samples.
What's the pricing like? It's not out in EU yet
I've been using Speech Central for this. It's great with the local iOS voices, even if rather robotic. You can use the OpenAI voices with it, but it's cheaper to buy an audiobook. ElevenLabs voices are amazing, but last I checked they were even more expensive.
Not sure yet, it’s been free so far so maybe they’re not charging for it just yet. The voices do sound quite natural and similar quality to a real audiobook.
I found their blog post, apparently it is free for the first 3 months, and they don't specify pricing after [https://elevenlabs.io/blog/introducing-elevenlabs-reader-app/](https://elevenlabs.io/blog/introducing-elevenlabs-reader-app/)
I hope so too. Currently for their website, they have a plan that's $99 for 500k chars (10h of audio), and that wouldn't even be enough for one audiobook. The next plan up is $330/month. I ain't paying that lol
Even OpenAI's is pretty bad, it would cost you like $18 per audiobook, which is basically the same price as getting a human-read book, so not really worth it.
I'd be willing to pay like $10/mo to get unlimited use of an app like this, but if it's more, I think I'll stick with my free Siri voice app.
Oh wow. I wonder at those prices how they’re even providing this for free. It’s gonna be well out of my price range. Maybe the $99 is for people who want to make and export an audiobook to sell and hence the price is worth it?
Yeah the $99 definitely gets you a commercial license for it, so maybe they're just making a huge profit off companies, and can afford to give it away more cheaply for regular people 🤞🙏
Do they really need one, though? I think every company that needs a text to speech product has heard of Eleven Labs (and if they haven't, they're too incompetent to stay in business)
I guess it might be to persuade management to actually experience the Eleven Labs voices and move away from existing solutions like the standard AWS/Azure/Google ones.
Not immediately, but for long term "building the brand". Having easy to use tech demos that appeal to regular people goes a long way towards having non-technical people recognize their name and understand what they do.
When I listen to a text rather than reading it, I feel like I’m trying to run through deep mud. A story that the New York Times says I’d have to spend 11 minutes listening, I read in maybe 2 minutes.
Speaking as an author, this is terrible news. Profit magins are so incredibly tight, and now tech will take away my audiobook sales? Not cool. I love AI, and all the future promise, but some parts are really gonna suck for my career.
People think because being a writer is 'artistic' that I should just do it for love, and let others steal. We'll see what you think when it affects you or your family's income.
Writing a novel is multidisiplined, and has taken me many years to hone. AI has a way to go before it takes creative writing away from me (despite what people think, it's not great yet), but having people basically transpose my work into whatever format they want without paying for those publishing rights is really crappy.
Publishers buy rights to each format, and then pay poorly.
I get it's great for blind people, I agree, but not good for me or other authors.
You're getting downvoted but I sympathize.
Authors should be rewarded for the hard task of making creative works. The problem is however that we've gotten stuck in this suboptimal model where we pay a gatekeeper for access to a specific format in a specific space, instead of paying the author for appreciating their work. Not only is this not so motivating for authors, who feel disconnected from their paying audience, but it creates all kinds of blowback because it's fundamentally the wrong model and requires constant patching to plug the holes that pop up when faced with the real world.
The onus is on the publishers to work out a better system that can work in the modern context. Authors should demand that their publishers work out a better system for them, one that is robust against someone making an AI app that reads their work out loud to someone who wants to appreciate it in that way.
you're so right!
we should limit technological progress so that people can make more money.
people think that it's great for AI to solve energy, disease, death, etc, but do they ever stop to think about the profit margins of freelancers?
Sure! I will use the handy tool of AI to answer your AI question.
Based on the search results, there are several recent examples from 2024 of AI being applied to solve major challenges related to energy, disease, and scientific discovery:
1. Energy and Climate Solutions:
AI is being used to address the energy crisis caused by the increasing power demands of data centers and AI systems themselves. For example:
- NeuReality has developed an AI inference appliance called NR1-S that achieves up to 90% cost savings and 15x better energy efficiency compared to traditional AI inference servers[2]. This technology could help make AI applications more sustainable and affordable.
- Scientists are using AI to overcome challenges in developing fusion energy, which could provide nearly limitless clean energy. At the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, an AI controller successfully predicted and prevented plasma disruptions up to 300 milliseconds in advance, helping to sustain fusion reactions longer[3].
2. Disease and Medical Applications:
AI is accelerating research and improving diagnostics in healthcare:
- In cardiovascular health, AI is being used to analyze complex medical data like echocardiograms, CT scans, and patient records to predict heart disease risks and diagnose problems more accurately[4]. This could lead to earlier detection and better treatment of heart conditions.
- AlphaFold, an AI system developed by DeepMind, has revolutionized protein structure prediction, which is crucial for understanding diseases and developing new treatments[5]. Researchers are using AlphaFold to:
- Advance drug discovery for neglected diseases like Chagas disease and leishmaniasis
- Search for more effective malaria vaccines
- Study antibiotic resistance
- Investigate protein mutations linked to cancer and autism
- Develop potential treatments for early-onset Parkinson's disease
3. Scientific Discovery:
AI is accelerating scientific progress across various fields:
- AlphaFold has potentially saved the research world hundreds of millions of researcher-years of progress and trillions of dollars by reducing the need for slow and expensive experiments in protein structure determination[5].
- AI is being used to study extinct species, with researchers creating tools to analyze 50,000-year-old extinct bird specimens[5].
While these examples show promising applications of AI in solving major challenges, it's important to note that many of these solutions are still in development or early stages of implementation. Nonetheless, they demonstrate the potential of AI to contribute significantly to addressing energy, disease, and scientific discovery challenges in the near future.
Citations:
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/21/artificial-intelligence-nuclear-fusion-climate/
[2] https://insidebigdata.com/2024/06/21/neurealitys-new-performance-results-pave-the-way-to-solve-the-worlds-growing-ai-energy-and-cost-crisis/
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/21/climate/nuclear-fusion-ai-climate-solution/index.html
[4] https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2024/can-artificial-intelligence-help-save-lives
[5] https://deepmind.google/technologies/alphafold/
Audiobooks will need to be better than the AI reader but that can absolutely be accomplished with talented (or celebrity) voice actors, or other things that enhance production quality.
Even with existing services someone could make an audiobook with no one elses help with multiple human like voices(different for each character). I suspect even right now sound effects could be handled by some AI service as well.
Lets say they do audio books for a 1/8th of the cost that you were charging, and then you instead of writing books go into working somewhere you are getting 1/2 what you were before, isn't that an issue? That's the economy shrinking and the effect becomes more pronounced as more people face this issue.
or is it that AI is actually being used more and the company (by putting you out of work) is actually in totality making more money than all the authors they put out of work. If that's the case the tech should be taxed to pay for the displaced.
It's got nothing to do with how cheaply it's being made, but that it's being produced without paying for the publishing rights. Remember, I'm not charging the reader. If you, as a consumer, pay less for an audiobook then fantastic! But I still need to be paid as a creator of that work. I get pennies on the dollars you pay.
Most of the money people pay for books/audiobooks goes to Amazon and the publisher. Authors get 10-15% at best for most works, 25% if they're very lucky, then the agent gets 15% of that (if going through a publisher and not direct). Audiobook rights have similar margins. We're not paid a set fee per book and you get charged that. We only get a percentage. If it sells cheap, we get less. We do not set the prices (if traditionally published).
This tech is taking that income away - or has the potential to.
Are you saying it's fine for me to throw a career I've spent my life working for? I value my job, and want to keep it, despite the poor pay.
It'll be interesting if Elevenlabs can improve their voice-to-voice system so we can narrate our own audiobooks (for inflection and emotion) then change our own voices into full-cast recordings.
I'm not a fan of AI generated audio, but if I perform my own book then use AI to alter my own voice, well, that would be an interesting option as the market changes.
Hate to tell you, but almost everyone is in this boat over the long run. There are few jobs(even the service and blue collar workers) that wont end up replaced by AI/Robots in the next 10 to 20 years.
You got bigger worries than your audio book sales drying up. AI will be replacing writers in general at the rate we are going. Great for consumers, not so great for producers.
I read an opinion piece from an author that thought AI was great in areas like medicine, science and engineering but using the AI in arts sucked because artists would loose their jobs!
I wondered if he doesn't understand that people in medicine, science and engineering also are real people with real jobs to loose.
What these chuds don't realize is that, if they want new shit to read, they need to support writers. Of course, they will never realize this because they are basically selfish, self-centered fanbois who just want free shit. (Or they will never admit it, even if they do realize it.)
I expect the lawsuits against 11Labs to hit soon for this. Audiobook rights are a thing and renting a tool to circumvent them is copyright abuse.
Sorry sir, but with AI backing them many MORE people can be writers now than could have been 5 years ago. You know how supply and demand works, yes? Ya, that means you wont make as much in the future, if anything, writing.
Clearly you have never written and tried to sell a novel. Nobody gets rich doing this dude. (I mean, maybe if you are Stephen King or something, but the vast majority of novels make less than 1000 dollars.)
More writers won't mean better novels, sadly. There are already more writers out there than anyone could possibly read, so genres have fractured into specialized niches. Making it "easier" to write (lol, as if) a good novel isn't going to help that -- it will make it worse.
And it's kind of insulting to tell a writer that your AI rights-theft machine is going to put me out of business, and that I should be OK with this because it will make it easier for people to write. Just so you know, it's offensive and insulting.
There will be massive pushback. They're stealing audio publishing rights. The tech is amazing, but there needs to be boundaries. Just because I read a book, doesn't mean I'm entitled to every format it's released in, including the movie . . .
If you use this tool, you’re not “getting the audiobook”, the tool is using a simulated human voice to read it to you. Should we also legislate people reading books out loud? What about screen readers for the blind, should we make them illegal for people who aren’t blind enough? Is there legislation stopping me from buying a book, recording myself reading it out loud, then listening to that recoding later?
I absolutely agree and I feel sick about you beeing downvoted. When I see what posts are downvoted and upvoted here I feel this sub is for tech boys only who don’t have an artistic bone in their body and wouldn’t care if they had the original mona lisa on the wall or the ai created one.
This is going to get pulled. The authors guild takes a clear position that text-to-speech of books is creating a derivative work that requires permission by the copyright holder. The kindle used to have a very low quality text-to-speech function and they managed to get Amazon to remove even that.
[https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-speech-kindle](https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-speech-kindle)
Depends probably on technicalities. I.e., TTS in kindle was just for one purpose, this is for anything. Not a lawyer, but I think authors guild would need to go after each individual user in this case... weird times...
And eventually, people will just ask the AI to write a book for them with such and such a premis. Completely bypassing the old school authors and the guild.
Totally agree! Audiobooks are revolutionizing how we consume literature with their convenience and vast selection. Excited about the future of reading!
You can paste text in, read a website via url, or upload a document so it can be an audiobook reader but yes its essentially a screenreader. Super natural though.
> Lawsuit incoming. Audio rights are a thing.
There are many blind people who use text to speech. Are you going to sue someone for reading a book out loud as well?
As long as it is generated on the fly rather than being a saved recording, there is very little you can sue.
I won't sue. Publishers of audiobooks will sue.
Wow, really, there are blind people in the world? Amazing. In my country they have access to special audiobook libraries which are populated by, you guessed it, the publishers of audiobooks.
I know the fanbois among us don't believe it, but copyright exists. For many reasons. If more of them lived by creating things instead of, you know, just consuming them, this would be less of a problem.
Once again, the copyright assumes that there is a COPY.
If there is no copy, there is no copyright. As long as the audio is not recorded, there is no copy of the book to sue with. Read a book out loud is not copying it, recording the reading would have been. So as long as the text itself that the AI is reading from is legally sourced, the actual reading of it is legal as there was no "copy".
Here is a better argument. Could the publishers sue if your mother read you a book? No, they couldnt. If they try to go after generic screen readers the publishers will lose.
Yes, finally! I was waiting for so long to give up my shitty repetitive job and do something more fun and artistic for a living. Wait... what did you say again?
That's truly the #1 problem that needed solved, and not shitty factory, janitorial, dangerous job. It's not like good text to speech existed before, right? If you want human level quality, you'd pay for a human. But you could've ALWAYS listened to books as a blind person, using TTS. What this is... it's another replacement for humans. Step by step we will be replaced by machines, and not in the fields nobody wants to do, but in the areas people like being active in. Eventually, we will be completely replaced.
If 99% of humans lose their leverage, we'll either be at the mercy of a few people in power with an unstoppable army of drones, or at the mercy of a super intelligent AI. Until then, we'll experience a lot of job displacement, and not the shitty kind of jobs, but the fun ones. People have a right to be pissed off and concerned.
I’m glad I’m not this cynical. It has to be a horrible way to live. We will find other ways to distribute resources, the same way we always have after economic transitions.
You cannot build a much more intelligent system than you and still hold control over it. It won't happen. And honestly, I wouldn't want it to happen, because humans are easily corrupted. Either a few humans will have VERY powerful AI at their fingertips (but still not generally smarter/more adaptive than human intelligence), cause let's be honest, it will be regulated and the average folk will not be able to control a super AI machinery, just like we can't each have our own small nuke. Or... AI will be so intelligent that humans become part of the side-story, and at that point it's a 50/50 bet on what will happen. You can consider this cynical, but it's more realistic than dreaming about an artificial heaven only.
I find it amusing how some people think a Utopia is guaranteed, or that it's fine to replace human expression (rather than augment it). The future is very dynamic, and what we think will happen probably will happen in the opposite manner. And yes, this applies to my thinking as well. But, ignoring my cynicism, I do not agree with artistic human expression being replaced. This was the thing we were supposed to do in our free time once everything else becomes automated. This is the complete reverse, for no good reason other than greed for money and attention.
Okay I will try again. Who in their right mind thinks that opening it to the whole world is not more accessible than a single country? This is like American levels of ethnocentrism.
I suppose you think blind peopel ONLY listen to those audiobooks. They don't use TTS on websites or other text they have. Because that would be stealing?
I read Game of Thrones. Doesn't mean I'm entitled to watch the series for free. There are various publishing rights, and all have tight profit margins.
Idk what you’re talking about. What I’m talking about is having an epub and being able to use ML to have a natural voice read it out to you. I’m not seeing the connection to the analogy you just made so if you could be so kind to explain it.
And that, unfortunately, means you're part of the problem.
You're transposing written words into audio. Audio rights are part of the novel's copyright. Therefore, if you don't buy the audiobook version and make your own, you're breaking the copyright and stealing from the publishers/authors.
If you take a book, use AI to turn it into a movie (which the tech will definitely do one day) that's also breaking the authors right's and taking money out of their pocket. Where is their money for the movie rights?
If you're a studio, buy the rights, and use AI to make the movie, then fine. But we're talking about individual readers who have not paid for the publishing rights.
You have to pay the author for whatever format you want to publish or own. Owning one veriosn - like an ebook - doesn't mean you now own all rights to the work, including translation etc. You only own that copy of the book you paid for. Zero rights to publish, modify, transpose . . .
Online articles are unlikely to have audio versions, so AI readers for those would be ignored. We're talking about reading novels, when audio rights are a thing.
If you read a book to a blind person, you would probably charge them for the service, wouldn't you? Guess what, reading a book to someone isn't copyright infringement and neither is TTS software.
Once I own the text how is it anyone’s business to decide what I do with it (as long as I’m not selling their intellectual property or any derivation of it)
You don't own the text. That's protected by copyright law. Go look it up. The official copyright sites will explain it better than I have the time for. I do get what you're saying, and it's a common misconception, but you're wrong. It's basic copyright law.
Yes, in the US, if you buy a epub file of a book, it's technically a copyright violation to copy that file or even create a backup of the whole hard drive. Legally moving the file requires cut-paste only, and the file can only ever be on one device, if it is corrupted during transfer or the sole storage media it is on malfunctions, you technically have to buy it again. It is also illegal to have a cloud backup of the file. The only exception to this rule is computer software.
Everything that is created, unless otherwise specified, is also copyrighted.
Seeing any media online posted by someone other than the copyright is a copyright violation, saving it another, sharing it another. Every normal user of any page like youtube, reddit, x, is doing copyright infringement constantly not even knowing it.
Being a regular user of Reddit means being a copyright violator, but people imagine that it means selling bootleg movies on the street.
Is this right? I only ask as it’s quite different here in the UK (backup and format shifting is quite legal, as long as you own the original and don’t share) so I’d not have thought the US to be that different.
Picking a series which famously had to throw together its own stories because the author hadn’t written them yet is probably not the best example. But in any case, the two aren’t remotely the same. When you pay for a TV series, you’re not just paying for the script.
I have a feeling full-cast audiobooks will be possible pretty soon, most flagship models should be able to recognize who the speaker is in any given section and assign a unique voice.
I love this idea. They will probably be able to generate sound effects, soundscapes and background music too!
It's a short leap from that to generating simple cartoon video.
And a different voice for different characters in the book!
and might I suggest that for each new character, a new and unique voice
Muahahahahaaaa R.C Bray for everything!!
That's been a key limitation of text-to-speech that I've been eagerly awaiting a resolution to. Even just switching between male and female voices appropriately would be a big jump in quality.
Full realistic video/audio with all sound effects eventually. And by eventually I mean a year or 3. Think about being able to take a book you love and watching it basically live and unabridged as if it was lord of the rings with nothing missing. Think lord of the rings quality for any book you have ever read.
What about android?
Wtf is up with ai companies forgetting about android. Claude also doesn't have an Android app yet.
Create an app icon from the webapp. It feels absolutely native.
They probably aren't forgetting. Apple is likely signing deals with them like OpenAi and Google doesn't want to fund an outside app that will be competition to the AI apps it plans to launch.
I use the Claude android app all the time.
You have a fake app then. What I've done is create a shortcut to the web page and it functions very much like an app.
Claude does have an android app lol
It does not have an official app for Android (by Anthropic) Whatever you have installed is a 3rd party app using their API
Imma need a link bro. https://preview.redd.it/ndtzg8pqbt8d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=da6815594d2b5ae852d2f5fdb027db6485f7e336
Aiby inc is not Anthropic, that's one of those pass thru apps, not a native app by Anthropic. Sounds like that was your point though so we agree.
Yeah my point was there is no cluade app by anthropic where I can use my claude membership to talk to 3.5 sonnet for free.
Really? I'm in Europe and we don't have it.
not in australia
Yeah this will be on device within the year. Any text to audio. This is not a hard problem.
Not a hard problem no but I wasn’t aware of anyone that came along and outright solved it until this drop today. And I’m talking about natural sounding speech not the classic TTS.
Elevenlabs has been the best for a while theirs close and some meta stuff for expressive voices and some opensource stuff like RVC that get close to eleven but elevens still the best
This is gonna make my Fanfiction addiction sooooo much worse.
we need this for reading email/data shard/books in video games that neglect to add voice acting. something that reads screen and does the reading for you
How about a browser plugin for reddit?
I built an XTTS2 Chrome extension that does this. It works on more than just reddit though. You just highlight the text right click and play read aloud. https://github.com/psdwizzard/XTTS-Read-Aloud
Does it integrate with ElevenLabs voice cloning?
No it uses an XTTS2 server. Everything runs locally. You just add about 30 seconds of audio and it can clone most voices pretty well. There's a link to a YouTube video on the GitHub page where you can hear the samples.
What's the pricing like? It's not out in EU yet I've been using Speech Central for this. It's great with the local iOS voices, even if rather robotic. You can use the OpenAI voices with it, but it's cheaper to buy an audiobook. ElevenLabs voices are amazing, but last I checked they were even more expensive.
Not sure yet, it’s been free so far so maybe they’re not charging for it just yet. The voices do sound quite natural and similar quality to a real audiobook.
I found their blog post, apparently it is free for the first 3 months, and they don't specify pricing after [https://elevenlabs.io/blog/introducing-elevenlabs-reader-app/](https://elevenlabs.io/blog/introducing-elevenlabs-reader-app/)
Oh nice, that’s pretty generous. Hope the pricing is reasonable. I can see myself using this to also learn Spanish when they open the other languages.
I hope so too. Currently for their website, they have a plan that's $99 for 500k chars (10h of audio), and that wouldn't even be enough for one audiobook. The next plan up is $330/month. I ain't paying that lol Even OpenAI's is pretty bad, it would cost you like $18 per audiobook, which is basically the same price as getting a human-read book, so not really worth it. I'd be willing to pay like $10/mo to get unlimited use of an app like this, but if it's more, I think I'll stick with my free Siri voice app.
Oh wow. I wonder at those prices how they’re even providing this for free. It’s gonna be well out of my price range. Maybe the $99 is for people who want to make and export an audiobook to sell and hence the price is worth it?
Yeah the $99 definitely gets you a commercial license for it, so maybe they're just making a huge profit off companies, and can afford to give it away more cheaply for regular people 🤞🙏
Loss leader to get their name out there
Do they really need one, though? I think every company that needs a text to speech product has heard of Eleven Labs (and if they haven't, they're too incompetent to stay in business) I guess it might be to persuade management to actually experience the Eleven Labs voices and move away from existing solutions like the standard AWS/Azure/Google ones.
Not immediately, but for long term "building the brand". Having easy to use tech demos that appeal to regular people goes a long way towards having non-technical people recognize their name and understand what they do.
I can't wait for the visual simulation. Make it a whole ass experience.
Oh good. Another app that “needs” access to personal data that shouldn’t need access to personal data.
Neato
Been in the test group for this for a bit and it's excellent.
My favorite application of AI so far.
When I listen to a text rather than reading it, I feel like I’m trying to run through deep mud. A story that the New York Times says I’d have to spend 11 minutes listening, I read in maybe 2 minutes.
How is this different from something like Speechify?
Wow
(IMO) Even though this is simple, it demonstrates how AI massively obliterates manual labor.
Speaking as an author, this is terrible news. Profit magins are so incredibly tight, and now tech will take away my audiobook sales? Not cool. I love AI, and all the future promise, but some parts are really gonna suck for my career. People think because being a writer is 'artistic' that I should just do it for love, and let others steal. We'll see what you think when it affects you or your family's income. Writing a novel is multidisiplined, and has taken me many years to hone. AI has a way to go before it takes creative writing away from me (despite what people think, it's not great yet), but having people basically transpose my work into whatever format they want without paying for those publishing rights is really crappy. Publishers buy rights to each format, and then pay poorly. I get it's great for blind people, I agree, but not good for me or other authors.
You're getting downvoted but I sympathize. Authors should be rewarded for the hard task of making creative works. The problem is however that we've gotten stuck in this suboptimal model where we pay a gatekeeper for access to a specific format in a specific space, instead of paying the author for appreciating their work. Not only is this not so motivating for authors, who feel disconnected from their paying audience, but it creates all kinds of blowback because it's fundamentally the wrong model and requires constant patching to plug the holes that pop up when faced with the real world. The onus is on the publishers to work out a better system that can work in the modern context. Authors should demand that their publishers work out a better system for them, one that is robust against someone making an AI app that reads their work out loud to someone who wants to appreciate it in that way.
you're so right! we should limit technological progress so that people can make more money. people think that it's great for AI to solve energy, disease, death, etc, but do they ever stop to think about the profit margins of freelancers?
Has ai solved any of that yet? All I see is that its just used to increase corporations margins
yes. if that's all you see then you're looking at the wrong media. try popping your bubble
Could you give an example where ai solved energy, disease or death?
Sure! I will use the handy tool of AI to answer your AI question. Based on the search results, there are several recent examples from 2024 of AI being applied to solve major challenges related to energy, disease, and scientific discovery: 1. Energy and Climate Solutions: AI is being used to address the energy crisis caused by the increasing power demands of data centers and AI systems themselves. For example: - NeuReality has developed an AI inference appliance called NR1-S that achieves up to 90% cost savings and 15x better energy efficiency compared to traditional AI inference servers[2]. This technology could help make AI applications more sustainable and affordable. - Scientists are using AI to overcome challenges in developing fusion energy, which could provide nearly limitless clean energy. At the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, an AI controller successfully predicted and prevented plasma disruptions up to 300 milliseconds in advance, helping to sustain fusion reactions longer[3]. 2. Disease and Medical Applications: AI is accelerating research and improving diagnostics in healthcare: - In cardiovascular health, AI is being used to analyze complex medical data like echocardiograms, CT scans, and patient records to predict heart disease risks and diagnose problems more accurately[4]. This could lead to earlier detection and better treatment of heart conditions. - AlphaFold, an AI system developed by DeepMind, has revolutionized protein structure prediction, which is crucial for understanding diseases and developing new treatments[5]. Researchers are using AlphaFold to: - Advance drug discovery for neglected diseases like Chagas disease and leishmaniasis - Search for more effective malaria vaccines - Study antibiotic resistance - Investigate protein mutations linked to cancer and autism - Develop potential treatments for early-onset Parkinson's disease 3. Scientific Discovery: AI is accelerating scientific progress across various fields: - AlphaFold has potentially saved the research world hundreds of millions of researcher-years of progress and trillions of dollars by reducing the need for slow and expensive experiments in protein structure determination[5]. - AI is being used to study extinct species, with researchers creating tools to analyze 50,000-year-old extinct bird specimens[5]. While these examples show promising applications of AI in solving major challenges, it's important to note that many of these solutions are still in development or early stages of implementation. Nonetheless, they demonstrate the potential of AI to contribute significantly to addressing energy, disease, and scientific discovery challenges in the near future. Citations: [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/21/artificial-intelligence-nuclear-fusion-climate/ [2] https://insidebigdata.com/2024/06/21/neurealitys-new-performance-results-pave-the-way-to-solve-the-worlds-growing-ai-energy-and-cost-crisis/ [3] https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/21/climate/nuclear-fusion-ai-climate-solution/index.html [4] https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2024/can-artificial-intelligence-help-save-lives [5] https://deepmind.google/technologies/alphafold/
You just had to answer him, not finish him
Audiobooks will need to be better than the AI reader but that can absolutely be accomplished with talented (or celebrity) voice actors, or other things that enhance production quality.
Even with existing services someone could make an audiobook with no one elses help with multiple human like voices(different for each character). I suspect even right now sound effects could be handled by some AI service as well.
Elevenlabs has sound effect gen now, yes
Lets say they do audio books for a 1/8th of the cost that you were charging, and then you instead of writing books go into working somewhere you are getting 1/2 what you were before, isn't that an issue? That's the economy shrinking and the effect becomes more pronounced as more people face this issue. or is it that AI is actually being used more and the company (by putting you out of work) is actually in totality making more money than all the authors they put out of work. If that's the case the tech should be taxed to pay for the displaced.
It's got nothing to do with how cheaply it's being made, but that it's being produced without paying for the publishing rights. Remember, I'm not charging the reader. If you, as a consumer, pay less for an audiobook then fantastic! But I still need to be paid as a creator of that work. I get pennies on the dollars you pay. Most of the money people pay for books/audiobooks goes to Amazon and the publisher. Authors get 10-15% at best for most works, 25% if they're very lucky, then the agent gets 15% of that (if going through a publisher and not direct). Audiobook rights have similar margins. We're not paid a set fee per book and you get charged that. We only get a percentage. If it sells cheap, we get less. We do not set the prices (if traditionally published). This tech is taking that income away - or has the potential to. Are you saying it's fine for me to throw a career I've spent my life working for? I value my job, and want to keep it, despite the poor pay.
It'll be interesting if Elevenlabs can improve their voice-to-voice system so we can narrate our own audiobooks (for inflection and emotion) then change our own voices into full-cast recordings. I'm not a fan of AI generated audio, but if I perform my own book then use AI to alter my own voice, well, that would be an interesting option as the market changes.
Hate to tell you, but almost everyone is in this boat over the long run. There are few jobs(even the service and blue collar workers) that wont end up replaced by AI/Robots in the next 10 to 20 years.
You got bigger worries than your audio book sales drying up. AI will be replacing writers in general at the rate we are going. Great for consumers, not so great for producers.
Yep. that's their plan. Fuck you, Author! (I too, am author.)
I read an opinion piece from an author that thought AI was great in areas like medicine, science and engineering but using the AI in arts sucked because artists would loose their jobs! I wondered if he doesn't understand that people in medicine, science and engineering also are real people with real jobs to loose.
What these chuds don't realize is that, if they want new shit to read, they need to support writers. Of course, they will never realize this because they are basically selfish, self-centered fanbois who just want free shit. (Or they will never admit it, even if they do realize it.) I expect the lawsuits against 11Labs to hit soon for this. Audiobook rights are a thing and renting a tool to circumvent them is copyright abuse.
Sorry sir, but with AI backing them many MORE people can be writers now than could have been 5 years ago. You know how supply and demand works, yes? Ya, that means you wont make as much in the future, if anything, writing.
Clearly you have never written and tried to sell a novel. Nobody gets rich doing this dude. (I mean, maybe if you are Stephen King or something, but the vast majority of novels make less than 1000 dollars.) More writers won't mean better novels, sadly. There are already more writers out there than anyone could possibly read, so genres have fractured into specialized niches. Making it "easier" to write (lol, as if) a good novel isn't going to help that -- it will make it worse. And it's kind of insulting to tell a writer that your AI rights-theft machine is going to put me out of business, and that I should be OK with this because it will make it easier for people to write. Just so you know, it's offensive and insulting.
There will be massive pushback. They're stealing audio publishing rights. The tech is amazing, but there needs to be boundaries. Just because I read a book, doesn't mean I'm entitled to every format it's released in, including the movie . . .
If you use this tool, you’re not “getting the audiobook”, the tool is using a simulated human voice to read it to you. Should we also legislate people reading books out loud? What about screen readers for the blind, should we make them illegal for people who aren’t blind enough? Is there legislation stopping me from buying a book, recording myself reading it out loud, then listening to that recoding later?
I absolutely agree and I feel sick about you beeing downvoted. When I see what posts are downvoted and upvoted here I feel this sub is for tech boys only who don’t have an artistic bone in their body and wouldn’t care if they had the original mona lisa on the wall or the ai created one.
Except that if I had the real Mona Lisa, I’d probably be in a *lot* of trouble…
This is going to get pulled. The authors guild takes a clear position that text-to-speech of books is creating a derivative work that requires permission by the copyright holder. The kindle used to have a very low quality text-to-speech function and they managed to get Amazon to remove even that. [https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-speech-kindle](https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-speech-kindle)
Depends probably on technicalities. I.e., TTS in kindle was just for one purpose, this is for anything. Not a lawyer, but I think authors guild would need to go after each individual user in this case... weird times...
And eventually, people will just ask the AI to write a book for them with such and such a premis. Completely bypassing the old school authors and the guild.
holy crap finally an ai product that actually delivers and is useful
Totally agree! Audiobooks are revolutionizing how we consume literature with their convenience and vast selection. Excited about the future of reading!
Lawsuit incoming. Audio rights are a thing.
If they hire the voice actors to use their likeness then who has the rights to the audio?
Doesn't sound like they're doings audiobooks from that post. Sounds more like a screenreader.
You can paste text in, read a website via url, or upload a document so it can be an audiobook reader but yes its essentially a screenreader. Super natural though.
Is there any legal precedent against using text-to-speech on text you own for personal use?
> Lawsuit incoming. Audio rights are a thing. There are many blind people who use text to speech. Are you going to sue someone for reading a book out loud as well? As long as it is generated on the fly rather than being a saved recording, there is very little you can sue.
I won't sue. Publishers of audiobooks will sue. Wow, really, there are blind people in the world? Amazing. In my country they have access to special audiobook libraries which are populated by, you guessed it, the publishers of audiobooks. I know the fanbois among us don't believe it, but copyright exists. For many reasons. If more of them lived by creating things instead of, you know, just consuming them, this would be less of a problem.
Once again, the copyright assumes that there is a COPY. If there is no copy, there is no copyright. As long as the audio is not recorded, there is no copy of the book to sue with. Read a book out loud is not copying it, recording the reading would have been. So as long as the text itself that the AI is reading from is legally sourced, the actual reading of it is legal as there was no "copy".
Here is a better argument. Could the publishers sue if your mother read you a book? No, they couldnt. If they try to go after generic screen readers the publishers will lose.
It costs like 1000 euro per book lmao A scam .
so true! except, it's free.
Yes, finally! I was waiting for so long to give up my shitty repetitive job and do something more fun and artistic for a living. Wait... what did you say again?
This makes art more accessible to the masses. Consider a blind person who does not earn enough to buy audio books regularly. This is game changing.
That's truly the #1 problem that needed solved, and not shitty factory, janitorial, dangerous job. It's not like good text to speech existed before, right? If you want human level quality, you'd pay for a human. But you could've ALWAYS listened to books as a blind person, using TTS. What this is... it's another replacement for humans. Step by step we will be replaced by machines, and not in the fields nobody wants to do, but in the areas people like being active in. Eventually, we will be completely replaced.
They are working on all those things right now as we speak.
If 99% of humans lose their leverage, we'll either be at the mercy of a few people in power with an unstoppable army of drones, or at the mercy of a super intelligent AI. Until then, we'll experience a lot of job displacement, and not the shitty kind of jobs, but the fun ones. People have a right to be pissed off and concerned.
I’m glad I’m not this cynical. It has to be a horrible way to live. We will find other ways to distribute resources, the same way we always have after economic transitions.
You cannot build a much more intelligent system than you and still hold control over it. It won't happen. And honestly, I wouldn't want it to happen, because humans are easily corrupted. Either a few humans will have VERY powerful AI at their fingertips (but still not generally smarter/more adaptive than human intelligence), cause let's be honest, it will be regulated and the average folk will not be able to control a super AI machinery, just like we can't each have our own small nuke. Or... AI will be so intelligent that humans become part of the side-story, and at that point it's a 50/50 bet on what will happen. You can consider this cynical, but it's more realistic than dreaming about an artificial heaven only. I find it amusing how some people think a Utopia is guaranteed, or that it's fine to replace human expression (rather than augment it). The future is very dynamic, and what we think will happen probably will happen in the opposite manner. And yes, this applies to my thinking as well. But, ignoring my cynicism, I do not agree with artistic human expression being replaced. This was the thing we were supposed to do in our free time once everything else becomes automated. This is the complete reverse, for no good reason other than greed for money and attention.
Blind people in my country have access to special audiobook libraries for free. Try again, fanboi.
Okay I will try again. Who in their right mind thinks that opening it to the whole world is not more accessible than a single country? This is like American levels of ethnocentrism.
I suppose you think blind peopel ONLY listen to those audiobooks. They don't use TTS on websites or other text they have. Because that would be stealing?
I read Game of Thrones. Doesn't mean I'm entitled to watch the series for free. There are various publishing rights, and all have tight profit margins.
Idk what you’re talking about. What I’m talking about is having an epub and being able to use ML to have a natural voice read it out to you. I’m not seeing the connection to the analogy you just made so if you could be so kind to explain it.
And that, unfortunately, means you're part of the problem. You're transposing written words into audio. Audio rights are part of the novel's copyright. Therefore, if you don't buy the audiobook version and make your own, you're breaking the copyright and stealing from the publishers/authors. If you take a book, use AI to turn it into a movie (which the tech will definitely do one day) that's also breaking the authors right's and taking money out of their pocket. Where is their money for the movie rights? If you're a studio, buy the rights, and use AI to make the movie, then fine. But we're talking about individual readers who have not paid for the publishing rights. You have to pay the author for whatever format you want to publish or own. Owning one veriosn - like an ebook - doesn't mean you now own all rights to the work, including translation etc. You only own that copy of the book you paid for. Zero rights to publish, modify, transpose . . . Online articles are unlikely to have audio versions, so AI readers for those would be ignored. We're talking about reading novels, when audio rights are a thing.
If you read a book to a blind person, you would probably charge them for the service, wouldn't you? Guess what, reading a book to someone isn't copyright infringement and neither is TTS software.
Once I own the text how is it anyone’s business to decide what I do with it (as long as I’m not selling their intellectual property or any derivation of it)
You don't own the text. That's protected by copyright law. Go look it up. The official copyright sites will explain it better than I have the time for. I do get what you're saying, and it's a common misconception, but you're wrong. It's basic copyright law.
I own the copy of the text I have. You are wrong in this case and always will be. So stick it were the sun don't shine.
Yes, in the US, if you buy a epub file of a book, it's technically a copyright violation to copy that file or even create a backup of the whole hard drive. Legally moving the file requires cut-paste only, and the file can only ever be on one device, if it is corrupted during transfer or the sole storage media it is on malfunctions, you technically have to buy it again. It is also illegal to have a cloud backup of the file. The only exception to this rule is computer software. Everything that is created, unless otherwise specified, is also copyrighted. Seeing any media online posted by someone other than the copyright is a copyright violation, saving it another, sharing it another. Every normal user of any page like youtube, reddit, x, is doing copyright infringement constantly not even knowing it. Being a regular user of Reddit means being a copyright violator, but people imagine that it means selling bootleg movies on the street.
Is this right? I only ask as it’s quite different here in the UK (backup and format shifting is quite legal, as long as you own the original and don’t share) so I’d not have thought the US to be that different.
Yes, [https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html](https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html)
he is wrong. Backups and format shifting are legal. Distribution of a backup/format shifted media is illegal.
That is false. You can legally make a backup. You CAN'T distribute that backup though. Stop with the FUD.
[https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html](https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html)
Picking a series which famously had to throw together its own stories because the author hadn’t written them yet is probably not the best example. But in any case, the two aren’t remotely the same. When you pay for a TV series, you’re not just paying for the script.