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Javier E

He's Narrating Your New Audiobook. He's Also Been Dead for Nearly 10 Years. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...arrate-your-audiobook-7528cd96

translation audiobook ai

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • AI’s reach into audiobook narration isn’t merely theoretical. Thousands of AI-narrated audiobooks are available on popular marketplaces including Alphabet Inc.’s Google Play Books and Apple Inc.’s Apple Books. Amazon.com Inc., AMZN +0.25% whose Audible unit is the largest U.S. audiobook service, doesn’t offer any for now, but says it is evaluating its position.
  • The technology hasn’t been widely embraced by the largest U.S. book publishers, which mostly use it for marketing efforts and some foreign-language title
  • it is a boon for smaller outfits and little-known authors, whose books might not have the sales potential to warrant the cost—traditionally at least $5,000—of recording an audio version.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Apple and Google said they allow users to create audiobooks free of charge that use digitally replicated human voices. The voices featured in audiobooks generated by Apple and Google come from real people, whose voices helped train their automated-narration engines.
  • Ms. Papel said there is still plenty of work for professional narrators because the new era of AI auto-narration is just getting under way, though she said that might not be the case in the future.
  • “From what I can see, human narrators are freaking out,
  • Melissa Papel, a Paris-born actress who records from her home studio in Los Angeles, said she recorded eight hours of content for DeepZen, reading in French from different books. “One called for me to read in an angry way, another in a disgusted way, a humorous way, a dramatic way,” she said.
  • Charles Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press, said the publisher has made about 100 audiobooks using Google’s free auto-narrated audiobook platform since early last year. The new technology made those titles possible because it eliminated the costs associated with using a production studio, support staff and human narrators.
  • “I understood that they would use my voice to teach software how to speak more humanly,” Ms. Papel said. “I didn’t realize they could use my voice to pronounce words I didn’t say. That’s incredible.”
  • DeepZen pays its narrators a flat fee plus a royalty based on the revenue the company generates from different projects. The agreements span multiple years
  • a national union that represents performers, including professional audiobook narrators, said he expects AI to eventually disrupt the industry.
  • Audiobook sales rose 7% last year, according to the Association of American Publishers, while print book sales declined by 5.8%, according to book tracker Circana BookScan.
  • eepZen says it has signed deals with 35 publishers in the U.S. and abroad and is working with 25 authors.
  • Josiah Ziegler, a psychiatrist in Fort Collins, Colo., last year created Intellectual Classics, which focuses on nonfiction works that are out of copyright and don’t have an audiobook edition. 
  • He chose Mr. Herrmann as the narrator for “The War with Mexico,” a work by Justin H. Smith that won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for history whose audiobook version Dr. Ziegler expects to publish later this year.
  • DeepZen, which has created nearly a hundred audiobooks featuring Mr. Herrmann’s voice, is pursuing the rights of other well-known stars who have died.
Javier E

The Coming Audiobooks Boom - Peter Osnos - Entertainment - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...245729

books audio trends

shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • one-third of those they surveyed in 2010 have listened to an audio book, and the percentage of listeners in the 18-24 age group is increasing because of the iPod and the ease of adapting audio (and podcasts) to MP3s
  • 31 percent of audiobooks are mysteries, thrillers, and suspense; 21 percent are bestsellers (presumably books such as Bossypants); 20 percent are general fiction; and 15 percent are history.
  • the demise of Borders, which featured CDs prominently, and a general reduction in bookstore shelf-space means there is less room for the packaging of boxed recordings. Libraries, however, continue to favor CDs, and a significant portion of audio listeners prefer to borrow rather than buy CDs. So, the domain of CD listenership is increasingly composed of library patrons.
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  • According to the Association of American Publishers, total gross sales for all books in 2010, as reported by 87 publishers, were about $15.6 billion, an increase of around 2.7 percent over 2009. CD audiobooks represented $189.7 million of that total, a drop of 11 percent. But the increase in download sales to $81.9 million was a boost of 38.8 percent, reflecting the shift toward digital audio, a trend that from all accounts has continued in 2011.
Javier E

The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ce-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic

pandemic profit economic response opportunity financial

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have,” he said over the phone. No argument here. He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.
  • He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share
  • He quickly put some money to work
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  • He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.
  • Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find.
  • The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty.
  • The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path.
  • perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.
  • I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s
  • they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus
  • They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.
  • it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings.
  • This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease.
  • “It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”
  • the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines
  • In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.
  • It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapses—haircuts for baldheads—leading to more defaults.
  • In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.
  • As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didn’t have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions
  • On March 20th, Goldman Sachs spooked the world, by predicting a twenty-four-per-cent decline in G.D.P. in the second quarter, a falloff in activity that seemed at once both unthinkable and inevitable. Subsequent predictions grew even more disma
Javier E

Silicon Valley Renegades Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ogue-solar-geoengineering.html

cli-fi Stephenson idea sulfur geoengineering experiment

shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • After bouncing around a bit more, he was drawn to the kite surfing and spearfishing in Baja California, Mexico, and decided to set up shop there. Then, in early 2022, as Mr. Iseman installed solar panels on the roof of his R.V., he listened to the audiobook of “Termination Shock,” a science fiction novel.
  • The book, by Neal Stephenson, plays out what happens when a billionaire in Texas takes it upon himself to start a massive solar geoengineering program, spraying huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the air with a giant cannon. Mr. Stephenson declined to discuss Make Sunsets.
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