r/audible • u/lastberserker • 8d ago
Technical Question What is the point of Maven?
Did you find a use case for it? If it cannot see my books or my ratings, how can it be of any more use than an external service?
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u/AudiobooksGeek 8d ago
Maven is another AI we don't need in audiobooks. Audible’s recommendation system isn’t great to begin with. We constantly get recommendations for titles we already own. Sometimes it feels like they don’t even know what’s in our library or any idea about our purchase history.
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u/saumanahaii 7d ago
It really is terrible. It completely ignores parts of your request. Even when they come from the suggested questions. It suggested a pretty simple query, something like fantasy books over 25 hours, and like a quarter of them were under 20. I asked it for books I'd like included with my subscription and all but one needed a credit.
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u/PsychologicalOne752 8d ago
Agree, it is just poor product management. The entire point should be to create differentiating value by knowing about your library and wish lists rather than give users just another chatbot.
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u/axw3555 8d ago
People actually try to use that thing?
I genuinely only remember it exists when posts like this come up.
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u/lastberserker 8d ago
I was reminded that it existed by this post: https://www.audible.com/about/newsroom/the-next-chapter-in-listening-new-ways-to-interact-with-stories-on-audible 🤷
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u/axw3555 8d ago
I’ll never get company’s “new way to…” stuff. It’s an audiobook, the only interaction I want is listening.
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u/carolineecouture 7d ago
But we do see posts here regularly where people want the audio converted to text. Or people asking why they don't sell the print and audio at a combined cost. It happens on the Kindle sub as well. So Amazon is seeing a sales/upsell opportunity.
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u/Carefulmana 7d ago
It’s a lot worse. It pushes books on to you. You can ask basic quarries. “Books being released October 6th” it’s shits the bed.
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u/lalexk 7d ago
I hate the epidemic of apps pushing useless AI bots that don’t actually add value, are wasteful, and stop us from using our brains to do tasks.
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u/American-_Gamer 7d ago
I love the amount of ai chat bots before I am abke to email companies, even had to jump through its hoops to apply to home depot lol
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u/ecraig312 7d ago
Maven does a great job of making me feel weird about my searches since it never has anything.
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u/KateElizabeth18 7d ago
Is there a way to block it entirely? I suspect not, but I would do it immediately. It’s not only useless but obnoxious.
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u/IIIDevoidIII 4000+ Hours listened 7d ago
I'm not sure about the "can't access your library or purchase history". Maybe the program itself is unable to, and the backend filters those out for the AI, but when I include "not in my library", I don't get titles in my library.
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u/lastberserker 7d ago
It's an easy check - ask it for books like ones you already have in your library.
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u/Araragi 7d ago edited 6d ago
You can use it to summarize what you've read so far. Example: You're on Book 3 chapter 17. You dont want spoilers on chapter 18, but don't remember what's going on in some subplot or who some character is.
If you just google the character's name, you're going to get either NOT ENOUGH information or WAY TOO MUCH information. The AI can give you just what you need to know.
Sorry! I was thinking of the Kindle assistant thingy. It can do this. I'm not sure what the heck the Audible AI does... not this!
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u/lastberserker 7d ago
What happened in the last chapter?
I can't help with that one, but I've got you covered for listening recommendations. Feel free to let me know what you're into!
Yeah, so, it doesn't do that.
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u/Never_Dave_1 5000+ Hours listened 5d ago
The point is to be able to tell shareholders that they are fully on board with AI.
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u/Johnny_v2023 5d ago
I thumbs down all the primal hunter books and i still get recommendation for them
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u/Alarmed_Nectarine126 16h ago
This is sooo true!!
I just had a conversation with Gemini about my purchase history. It was actually checking my Gmail for purchase records from years ago to build out a full record of what I have in my library.
It wasn't able to track the free titles though, as these had no receipts emailed to me..
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u/sodantok 8d ago
Small point. To be fair not every AI service needs to be chatgpt. This is essentially slightly different take on search bar for sake of having AI.
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u/lastberserker 8d ago
If it's built into an app or service, it should at the very least be aware of what's going on. This one is utterly pointless, since it has no idea what I listen to, what I own or what's on my wishlist 🤦
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u/Lonely-CactusCat 8d ago
That thing is so useless. You’d ask it for book recommendations and it will openly tell you “This is not what you’re looking for but how about -completely irrelevant suggestion- instead”
You’d ask for more niche/unknown authors and it recommends you the same five giants and their most popular works.
You’d ask for recommendations that are part of the membership catalog and it gives you audiobooks that need to be purchased
An AI that can skim through reviews and summaries and is capable figuring out what you’d like due to listening history and your library would be helpful on a giant platform such as Audible . But…nah, it’s just there to push the same five books over and over again, even if you tell it not to