🚨Please Note🚨

This episode was prepared in late November/early December 2022. I learned in mid-December that Google Play Books now allows for multiple narrators in their AI narration tool. (The tool lets you set a "Default narrator" and "Additional characters," with different voices.) Please keep that in mind as you listen to this episode.

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Full transcript and links:

https://sponge.ithakaonmymind.com/audio/019-let-it-be-known-that-i-do-not-object-to-the-machine-overlords/

Everything I do is organized here:

https://ithakaonmymind.com/

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To worry about the demise of human translation due to AI is to both underestimate and overestimate translations. And, perhaps, by extension, to worry about the demise of human narration due to AI is to both underestimate and overestimate narrations. These are some things I absorbed from the recent developments in AI translation and narration.

And by “recent,” I mean the year 2022, in general. But, here is a date that is more specific. In May 2022, Google Books came out with a tool that writers could use to have their ebooks on Google Books narrated by AIs. I have tried using this tool, although I have not published with this tool. At this time, all my books are fiction, and the tool is not yet suited for fiction narration. However, it was and is amazingly, oh, amazingly impressive for nonfiction narration where, within the text itself, there is only one character, the narrator of the nonfiction story.

That said, Google is absolutely going to add to their AI the ability to act different voices. So, I can imagine a near future where for fiction books, the writer will be able to tag each character with some sort of metadata, say, “Character A, female, age 20, American English accent,” and then the AI will act that.

It might even soon be possible for specific contexts to be edited, to add nuance. Maybe Character A is sick, or she is excited, or she is sad. Even more impressively, perhaps AIs will soon become more like actual AIs, as in, artificial beings with something resembling intelligence, and be able to read the context. As in, maybe the AI will be able to “understand,” in air quotes, the context of a story and act accordingly. Now, that would be something.

But such things aren’t possible, yet. On the translation end, there is DeepL. I think that’s how they say their name. Deep-L. But it might be DeepL. I don’t know.

Anyway, DeepL has been mentioned in various circles as the company that offers better translations than Google Translate, because, let’s be honest. Google Translate sucks, especially for language pairs that aren’t very popular. Google Translate for Korean to English is outright laughable. It’s like vomit. English to Korean is slightly better, but still in no shape or form entirely reliable.

DeepL does not have the Korean English language pair yet, at the time of this recording, which is December 2022. But I have tried it for English to German some time ago. My German speaking and writing skills are poor, but I have lived in Germany for six years as a child and I can read and understand—at least enough to know that a translation is completely wrong. So, although I am not equipped to be a German translator, I am in a position to see if a translation software completely sucks or is quite great. DeepL’s software is quite great. However, it cannot read the context.

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