I must admit I've got such mixed feelings when it comes to AI voices reading things. On the one hand, it enables creativity for people who don't have the funds to pay actual voice actors or have access to a pool of people with the talent and right voices/accents to read out loud (doing it without lots of "ummm" and "aaaah" is quite a skill !). But on the other hand, it's killed a lot of jobs, and it's still on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. I have a particular dislike of the way YouTube is being filled up with AI-generated stuff, but a lot of that is down to the low quality and production values.
But if I decide to publish an audiobook starring the Einheriar, the imperfections of AI would be perfect for them, since they are basically autonomous robotic AI war machines 😁
I wish I had the money to hire some real voice actors to do it, but at the moment, it's a bit outside my reach. The main reason for doing so is that I don't really have much control over the tone or direction of the voices. Also, some of the AI ones kind of take away from the material a bit. But, as proof of concept, it's good.
It'll be interesting to see if a few months of this might attract enough of a following to make hiring actors and adding more production value possible in the future. That would definitely be the goal anyway.
That makes total sense ! Something to look at is your circle of friends, to see who has a good speaking voice with the right tone and accent. You might just have to do a lot of editing until they get into practice reading longer passages without error. Or perhaps you could use them for smaller dialogue parts with AI doing the main narration, blending human and machine.
!BBH
!PIZZA
You know what, that would be a great idea!
To be fair, I could swap out voices from this file at any stage in the edit, so it could be well worth looking into that on a very small scale.
The main narrator voice is actually pretty good, and it seems to get pronunciation fairly correct which was something I was afraid of.