INTP Live

Maybe we were going to see this change eventually and Covid just sped it up. But I work with a publishing house that makes schoolbooks for K-12 kids, and there has been a boom in the use of automatic speech in online textbooks.

As somone that has to listen to this voice all day in order to insert any corrections to the text that's being read, I can tell you that automatic voice fatigue is real. This is like listening to an answering machine the entire day. In the past (and in many cases, still today), audio was read by real people, voice actors. This is disappearing fast. I have to wonder how this would impact the learning experience for kids. Surely it can't help them to be educated by a robot voice?

Like I said, maybe this was just the way the world was going.

Probably automatic voices are going to get better. Irritation is quite a strong motivation to improve something.

Madrigal wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 31, 2021 10:19 am

As somone that has to listen to this voice all day in order to insert any corrections to the text that's being read, I can tell you that automatic voice fatigue is real. This is like listening to an answering machine the entire day. In the past (and in many cases, still today), audio was read by real people, voice actors. This is disappearing fast. I have to wonder how this would impact the learning experience for kids. Surely it can't help them to be educated by a robot voice?

Hang on, someone can't be bothered to read a book out loud after writing it?

That makes me wonder what production value of the original work -- writing anything worth a damn takes a lot of effort. Reading something in a pleasant voice should be pretty easy once you get good at it...

Why do that when you can have every book read to you by AI Joe Rogan?