Marda Audio! (Patreon)

I continue to experiment with the Amazon AI beta, which I broke three times now, but it's (sort of) working again. They added four more voices, and one of them was a sweet-tempered British girl so I picked that one for Coracle... and when I started listening to it in the car to see how it sounded, I just... kept listening. It is quite listenable. I'm not sure how I feel about it, except that I'm glad to have another book to offer to my visually impaired readers.

Some other notes:

• The beta doesn't currently let you remove items from the table of contents, so I was stuck with it reading out the alt text for the two images at the beginning of the book. I did, however, get the idea to change the pronunciation of the word 'image' to 'image of the title page, with floating tree' and that made it much more palatable. Which brings me to:
• I made that change and it was immediately reflected in the sale sample. You can't even get that fast a shift with ebook uploads. Very nice!

Honestly, I have so many conflicting thoughts about the use of AI. Technology's always made some processes obsolete: do we even think about fonts making calligraphy a niche art? Certainly no monks were harmed in the transcribing of any modern book, and widespread use of books wouldn't be possible if they were still handcrafted. As always, technology brings both fruits and rot, and we get to decide what to do about it.

I think maybe my rosy future is one where the creators of AI tools pay licensing fees to creative people to train their models, but I have no idea if we'll end up there. We certainly won't if art isn't valued, and I wonder if artists haven't dug their own graves with centuries of arrogance, flakiness, and entitlement. Difficult thoughts.

But anyway, do have a listen to the sample, it is surprisingly charming. (It is Amazon/Audible only, because it's an Amazon beta program, so if you're on BN or Kobo and can't find it, that's why!)