Neil Gaiman on the (silly) hoopla over the Kindle & its ability to “read” books to you, robot-to-human:
As I said first time out, and this is speaking as someone who loves audiobooks, records his own audiobooks, makes a not-insignificant portion of his income from audiobooks and has even won awards for bloody audiobooks… To repeat myself — I think any money that could be spent on legal bills trying to stop people listening to books (or to anything still in copyright) using the text-to-speech functions on their computers, iPhones, Kindles, Androids etc, would be infinitely better used to promote audiobooks, to tell people there are fine audiobooks out in the world, that there are great books and great readers, and that the experience of listening to a book is a wonderful one. Promote the Audie awards. Get the word out. [more…]
I think it’s fair to say, on behalf of the LibriVox community: hear hear!
I second that “Hear, hear” to Gaiman’s position. I don’t even like the man’s books, to be honest, but my respect for him and the possibility that I will try one more of his books (just in case) just went up about 10 notches.
I own a Kindle2. I tried the text to speech feature. Authors have nothing to fear when it comes to losing money to Kindle or any speech program – text to speech is AWFUL. I will continue to buy audiobooks.
If you don’t get the inflections right “Neil Gaiman” becomes “Kneel, gay man!”
I LOVE Neil Gaimans audio books…especially the ones he reads (has a wonderful reading voice), I could not imagine listening to a “computer” reading a book to me when a well read audio book is available
I doubt that people who have been willing to purchase audiobooks before will suddenly start using the Kindle feature as a replacement. Lets face it, audiobooks are expensive and those that are willing to pay that expense do so for the enjoyment of a good reading, not a stilted computerized reading. The Kindle feature is quite useful, particularly when it comes to text that have a technical bent and usually are not made into audio books. For those that have limited sight or want their hands and eye free to enact instructions on (for example) how to fix their plumbing – the feature would be helpful. This is like comparing a hammer to a painting – one is a useful tool; the other is a piece of art.
i DLed THE GODFATHER’S REVENGE for my Kindle and tried the computer reading function in my car while i was driving for about a MINUTE….its just not the same….
I don’t see what people are complaining about. Text to speeches are NOTHING in comparison to people reading it. Neil Gaiman’s audio books are AMAZING and I wouldn’t try and get any alternative to them, no matter how cheap they are.
I’m pretty sure the Author’s Guild is evil and hates society and culture. First the Google Books ordeal, now this bs.
Bare in mind that 99% of the Author’s Guild members, like equity, make barely anything and so the slightest chance of squeezing blood out a stone will be pounced upon like .
while there are many good ones, there are also some very bad professional readers out there, to whom even the kindle’s robo-voice is preferable. i’d personally rather hear monotone than mis-intoned readings.
The one marginal value in the Author’s Guild argument is to carefully preserve the copyright on audiobook versions. Can’t allow digital publication rights to imply audiobook rights, after all. I agree text-to-speech just isn’t There yet. But that may not always be true.
As Grizzly said, text-to-speech may not be very listenable at this time, but it will someday. Maybe five years. Maybe twenty. If the Author’s Guild lets it slide now then they’ve essentially allowed it for good. That’s the thing with copyright law. You’ve got to protect early and constantly otherwise you’ve lost it for good. As for the current text-to-speech, I think it’s horrible but who knows what is in some research department at Microsoft right this minute.
I have to disagree with JoJo. A machine can never convey emotion, let alone detect it in a wall of text – I doubt one ever will.
Much like I will spend money on professional audiobook productions instead of the free Librivox offerings (albeit I support Librivox wholeheartedly), there will always be a market for audiobooks read by humans as long as there are books themselves. Machines cannot act, just like they cannot create art.
As Neil Gaiman remarked, the money would be better spent on quality products rather than bickering.
Since Amazon owns Audible.com, I doubt Amazon would release a product they thought would be a threat to human-read audiobooks. Why would Amazon acquire a business like Audible, and then try to put Audible out of business themselves? They wouldn’t. The text-to-speech feature on the Kindle is little more than an add-on feature that very few people will likely even use. Especially after they hear what it sounds like.
Ben, I have to disagree. With research facilities making robots now that can very closely simulate human emotions, and the advent of cloud computing which will open up vast amounts of processing power, computers will be able to emote very well in the near future. Keep your eyes open, AI is near. I’ve been a software developer for nearly 8 years now and I can guarantee that computers will think on their own inside most young people’s lifetimes.
As a professional translator, I can say that robot reading is like translation software: it misses context, nuance and emotion. Maybe someday it will be a viable replacement; so far, give me the human element. Every time.
My 7 year old grandson was home from school, sick and I was asked to babysit. I arrived listening to Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” on my MP3 player. Grandson wanted to know the story.
I re-enacted the parts I’d already heard and then we listened to the rest together. I’ve never spent a closer, finer time with him. 3 hours, cuddled on sofa, each with one of the earphones in, and we were mesmerized. I watched his face as he listened, his eyes widening with excitement, joy or fear. It was wonderful.
We even let the dog out, inching our way to the back door, shoulder to shoulder, so as not to dislodge our shared earphones. He didn’t want to miss a second. (Neil Gaiman, we love you!) At the end, grandson said solemnly, “THIS is going to be a GREAT movie, Mom-Mom”.
We always listen to audio book CDS in car on trips to beach, or where ever…but MP3 player style was a whole new experience for him and now he’s hooked. But no way would we listen if it was a “computer-generated” voice. Ick.
And for the poster above who doesn’t like Gaimans’s books, may I suggest something like “The Road”. I bought that in audio for my grown son. He listened every day while driving back and forth to work. He’s a tough ex-Marine, manly-man type, yet the book made him cry…
Lost part of my post above. My Toshiba laptop has two choices for text to speech; the execrable Microsoft Sam, or the Toshiba reading voice.
Supposedly, Toshiba voice can be “trained” by your own reading voice.
You type in a long excerpt of anything, plug in a mic and read it aloud, then submit it. It teaches the computer how to pronounce words properly. The difference in the voice after training was marginal.
Setting the option for longer pauses did make a a good difference. Pronunciations, tone, inflection, still not that great, lots of errors, but 10x better than horrible Microsoft Sam.
There is presently software for sale that installs your choice of different reading voices, in many different accents and languages, on your PC. Some are halfway decent. So…with such improvements already being developed, a few years down the road, at most, I expect we’ll be seeing (hearing) perfectly acceptable text aloud readers.
Companies that own devices such as the Kindle with voice readers will have to pay a little extra to the book owners, when that happens. Copyrighted audio SHOULD be paid for, just like the text versions.
I expect we’ll also see some type of DRM included with ebooks that prevents text aloud readers from executing unless the buyer has purchased that option with the book. Then we’ll see just as many illicit “cracks” and workarounds being distributed across the internet…
I must admit that after having watched movies about the future and all the exciting flying cars we were supposed to have and other nonsense ill say that the future is turning out to be a knockoff of the past, a cheap one at that.
I dont want to hear a computer read to me, when i call someplace and get a recording i just yell “HUMAN” until i get someone with a pulse.
kindle is a joke, even a boring book when read by a person who liked it is better than a puter spittin out words.
By the way, this site is AWESOME, if i didnt constantly yawn when i read i would do a book… im working on the yawning.
This entire thread is dead wrong about text-to-speech, which is not surprising considering its origin.
I don’t have experience with Samanta, the best voice available for the Kindle, but I have lots of experience listening to her and other text-to-speech readers on computers.
Please don’t mention Microsoft Sam — it is awful, but the newer Anna, which came free with my recent Windows Vista, is pretty good, though not compared to Samantha, and another great voice I purchased recently, with a British accent, from Nuance: Serena. They are very good.
What people don’t realize is that readers add their own interpretation of the characters when they are reading. They are trying to sell their interpretation and often exaggerate the humor or emotion where it doesn’t belong.
Text-to-speech readers don’t try to exaggerate — they just read the words, and on the new, good ones (which all cost money), their pronunciation is usually just fine.
Especially delicious was Serena, a voice with a British accent, when I was recently listening to Sherlock Holmes stories. I have also listened to about half of the Henry James novels and most of the Sue Grafton alphabet detective novels, among many others. Other great voices are Crystal, from AT&T, and Heather, I forget the company. All these voices can be purchased for about $30 or so from several places, but the main one is http://www.nextup.com, where you can also hear samples. But the quality of these voices is better appreciated with a long test, just as you might take awhile to get used to a human reader. Once you get used to text-to-speech, humans often sound like they are tugging at your sleeve, begging you to respond.
Great human readers are great, but sometimes we don’t want a treatment, we just want what the authors put into the novels. Good computer voices give us that.
Unlike some people in this thread, I love Neal Gaiman, an amazing reader, by the way.
You know Gene, as I was reading your post, I was thinking about myself as an “anti-text-to-speecher”, and then all the people who say: ebooks are no good because I don’t like them; or audiobooks are no good because I don’t like them.
In the case of audiobooks & ebooks, just because one person doesn’t like them; so too text-to-speech.
These are all just different ways to access books – some people will like some ways, others will like others.
So, no longer will I be “anti-text-to-speech” … but I do reserve the right to prefer human-read ones.
Well it is easy to get books with the text to speech function and it does sound better than the old commodore 64 speech program but it is not really as good as some one reading it instead. It is useful for like my wifes cousins both of which are blind to sit and do books that way. Otherwise they have to wait long periods of time for books for the blind to arrive. So it depends on your needs.
I find that my brain can transpose the proper emotion and inflection on text-to-speech, and I’m not a very advanced robot. It’s kind of like when you start a movie with subtitles, and if the movie’s good, you don’t even think about the fact you’re reading after about five minutes. It becomes natural.
That said, there are some masterful people out there doing audiobook reading. Most author-read books are so-so, but even some of them are very good.
I like books, in every form. Except braille. I just can’t seem to get the hang of that one. Luckily, I’m not blind or deaf. Or impotent.