The Seventh Minute Audiobook

NOTE From Chris: I asked if any writers also wanted to hear their story read by Text to Speech (after we did an exploratory test with another story) and several responded, including Claire. Her story is above, and here’s what she said…

Hearing my words come to life with a voice for the very first time was cool / weird.

Knowing that that voice was artificially generated was cooler / weirder.

Had I not been told that that was a fake voice – I would not have guessed it. She was impressively real. The small inflections on certain words, the way dialogue was spoken differently and the pacing of the storytelling, was really spot on.

The other thing I thought as I was listening, was during the particularly graphic scenes, the voice didn’t really recognize the gore and add extra emotion to the reading, like a human might have? – but in a strange kind of way, it worked*.

Graphic details delivered in that matter-of-fact way added to the creepiness of the story. So maybe that’s a good thing?  But I don’t know if it would work for every story? And I don’t know if AI knew it would work and chose to do it that way?

Overall, when you take into account the time it takes to generate a narration (20mins) and the variations you have at your fingertips- for example voice tone, gender, nationality etc – I think that an AI reading of a story is pretty awesome to say the least.

Does it replace a human reader?  I want to say no, no way, never…  But I feel like, eventually, it definitely will.

* Note from Chris – I agree, not all stories will work, but the melancholic ones, especially with female voices, tend to be stronger. It’s not there fully just yet, but as Claire says, it will be. And if I am honest, I think it will be sooner rather than later.

Also, it’s a FANTASTIC tool to just have your words read back to you, so you can hear what you do not see when you read.