The Robot Uprising Has Begun

Where does Troublemakers rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Most annoying book I've ever listened to.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Troublemakers?

Realizing the book was being read by a robot. A pretty good one, but a robot none the less.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Have you ever wanted to have Julie from Amtrak read you a book? If so, buy this book! If not, and if you'll be distracted by the odd inflections, weird little pauses and always slightly out of sync feeling of text to speech conversion, avoid this title.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Well, I listened to as much of it as I'm ever going to listen to in one setting. All of about 15 minutes worth of it to be exact. I kept hoping maybe it was a joke. "Hey, did you realize that the intro was read by a computer? Ain't science wonderful? Now here's a real person to read the book!" Sadly, that's not what happened.

Any additional comments?

Hire a human and record the book again.

14 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Do not allow text-to-speech on Audible

It is very clear from the tonality, and many sound elements, that the book is being narrated by a text-to-speech engine, and not a very good one at that (I have validated my impressions with software developers involved in the field, in addition to my own experience). I can't listen to 16.5 hours of this.

Audible: do not allow text-to-speech in your catalogue please. When we buy an Audible title it is to have the satisfaction of having it read by a human with the sensibilities of a human. If we want text-to-speech we can just buy the Kindle version and have it narrated using the operating system's text-to-speech narration service for the visually impaired. I understand that having automated narration is much cheaper to produce, but also understand that the value of the end product is also much, much, much lower.

I hope this is not an indication of things to come.

27 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Great book, bad narration

This is the book I was so looking forward to for months. I have both the physical book and the audio book. And I’m not disappointed with the book itself.

But the narration? It’s so bad that this is the first time I’m writing a review because of the horrible narration. Weak and very unstable voice.

7 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Great book. Horrible narrator.

A great book about the early days in Silicon Valley spoiled by a narrator who sounded like a robot, mispronounced names, and said "Silicone" instead of "Silicon."

1 personne a trouvé cela utile

robovoice narration

the book is hard to listen to because of the robotic voice, would be better to read

1 personne a trouvé cela utile

Terrible narration

The book is actually pretty good, but couldn't stand more than a few minutes of the text-to-speech narration. It's sad to realize that Audible is now using TTS robots instead of human narrators. Sign of the times, I guess.

Do yourself a favor and get the Kindle or the dead tree version.

1 personne a trouvé cela utile

I failed my book quiz

I should have just read the book. End of story, usually audio books work.. not in a book like this one. Also seemed a little biased towards certain parts of the entire computer revolution it’s self.

Narrated by a robot

Confused as to why it says ‘narrated by’ it is clearly a robot that’s reading the book.

The uncanny valley is just too creepy, I can’t enjoy the story since I can’t get pass the robot weird intonations.

Good Story, Poor Reading

The reader is not a machine but unfortunately she seems to be imitating one. At first, I wasn't sure I would get through the book but after a while, I got into the story and got used to the reading. In the end, the book was pretty good overall.

Awful book, terrible reader

First, this book is not read by a robot - it’s just read by a terrible reader who sounds like a robot. In either case it sounds like a robot - and isn’t very good. You can improve it somewhat by increasing the play speed to 1.25x - it makes it sound a bit better.

But why would you want to do anything but hit stop on this book? If you’re a social justice warrior or a left wing nut job or someone that thinks history needs to meet sexual and racial quotas - this is the book for you. If you’re someone that came here to hear a story about the beginning of Silicon Valley and isn’t interested in the authors boring left wing political view - then you’ll probably want to skip this one.

It really is a shame people can’t just write history books without injecting their own politics into everything. I don’t care if I agree or don’t agree, the book isn’t about the author, it’s about the subject - and clearly the author doesn’t get this entry level concept.

Anywho I’d skip this as there are much better and more interesting books available on the subject - and you can get a much better readers as a bonus. But if you love robots and think ANTIFA is great - then this is for you.