*audiobook; corrected
Do they do anything particular with their voice or tone in order to enhance the story?
I’m going to be controversial.
I think the best audiobook is text to speech.
I prefer to not filter any stories through an other person. I want the raw data from the book, without any other feelings and impressions added to the original.
AI readings are demonstrably terrible.
More butchery of the English language I’ve never heard.
This is why I said that I am going to be controversial.
Text to speech is only going to be better with time.
My most important preference is to have the text delivered without reader bias towards its contents. And that’s only possible with computer speech.
Understood & I hear you. Some people’s voices, candor and pace can put me right off listening, make me want the words without their voice. Unfortunately, with a well voiced & read book, I’ll listen far longer than I can bring myself to focus on actual reading. Though reading the words makes them stick in memory differently, mostly better, than listening for me.
Even when the author coached the narrator? I know of at least one audiobook where the author used the narrator’s voice to fill in what words on paper couldn’t
That sounds like a special scenario.
Tho I’m not sure if a book needs a narrator it can be still called a book instead of a theater piece or voice play.
Wil Wheaton brings a lot to the books he narrates, but the best combo I’ve heard so far is John Malkovich reading Breakfast of Champions.
Dear god no. Wil Wheaton has the most grating, whiny, nasal voice I’ve ever heard, immediately puts me off any book he narrates. He only has one reading style which doesn’t translate at all between different books
I listened to Dubliners by James Joyce narrated by irish actor Andrew Scott (Moriarty in Sherlock) and it was hands down the best narration I’ve ever heard.
The Alan Partridge autobiography’s voiced by Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge but I suppose you’d only like it if you’d seen enough Alan Partridge.
No answer just curious as well, I’d love a good text to speech function. There are so many books I want to “read” but don’t have audiobooks for them, I have a hard time focusing on text for very long, so it hard to get through longer things.
