Audible Is Giving Publishers AI Tools To Quickly Make More Audiobooks

Amazon's Audible is expanding its audiobook offerings by giving select publishers access to its AI-powered production tools that will let them more easily convert books into audiobooks with over 100 customizable AI voices to choose from. It will also launch an AI translation tool in beta later this year to help publishers translate and localize audiobooks into multiple languages, with both automated and human-assisted options. The Verge reports: Audible says its new AI narration technology leverages Amazon's advanced AI capabilities and will be made available to interested publishing partners in the coming months in one of two ways. For publishers wanting to be hands-off, an end-to-end service managed by Audible handles the "entire audiobook production process" right up to publication, while a self-service option will give publishers access to the same tools so they can independently direct the entire production process.

With both options, publishers are able to "choose from a quickly growing and improving selection of more than 100 AI-generated voices across English, Spanish, French, and Italian with multiple accent and dialect options, and will be able to access voice upgrades for their titles as our technology evolves," according to Amazon. [...] Publishers will also be able to review translations themselves or opt for a human review through Audible with a professional linguist.

Conversion Quality

[LowestKey]

I'll be interested to see how these sound to the human ear. I bought some tech training videos that used these from an official source for a cert. The cadence and forced breaths had that uncanny valley vibe that made it hard not to notice. Perhaps it's less noticeable if you're just background listening for pleasure or something.

Re:

[Local ID10T]

The seemingly random pauses in mid sentence bug me. Occasionally the pronunciation of a common word is off.

Overall, it is good enough. Definitely better than an amateur reader, but not up to the quality of a professional voice actor.

100 customizable voices...

[sarren1901]

I read this and immediately thought, wow wouldn't it be cool if each character had it's own voice. So one chapter focusing on Character A would be in Character A's voice and another chapter with Character B's perspective would be in that voice.

Shame that's not remotely what's going on here, though if AI can help "read" books into acceptable audiobooks, that seems like a net win for anyone that enjoys audiobooks.

Maybe if we could pick the "Morgan Freeman" narratives version, I could start listening to books

Re:

[SScorpio]

Some narrators already do that and will flip between different voices line to line. There's also full cast productions where a different person is narrating each character.

There are other's that can include sound effects and music at points. And even some that have a wider sound field "immersive audio". Many of these change the audio book into an audio drama or play. They can be a fun way to consume a story.

The main thing I'm looking forward to is for foreign language dubs. You could replicate how each char

I buy audiobooks to hear a person read the book.

[Shane A Leslie]

I would actually boycott or simply pirate any author that tries to foist AI read books on me.

Folks please reject these AI narrated books.

[Smonster]

I often choose audiobooks for three reasons. The content, the author, and the narrator/narrators. I’m not going to pay for any AI narrators. I’d rather just read the book myself. If the majority of books are read by AI, I will just listen to a lot less audio books. I hope the rest of you reject this as well.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

I'm not going to pay for human narrators. I tried Audible a while back, but the price was ridiculous. If AI can bring down the price to be competitive with paperbacks or ebooks, I'd definitely go for that. Audible won't do that, they're too hooked on their price gouging. It's going to take a competitor to step up and disrupt that market.

Another filter is gone.

[gratuit]

Though it is very imperfect, the barrier to the creation of an audiobook seemed to have some bearing on the quality of the work. As in, if the book had an audiobook it was more likely that the author actually put effort into it. I am now worried that we will be very soon inundated with mediocre AI assisted fiction read by lifeless AI and trying to make a decision on whether to buy a book based on AI written reviews.

Audiobooks are more than plain reading aloud...

[jesco]

So instead of paying for a dramatic reading of a book with all the nuances of the narrator's interpretation of the book we will get a monotone unreflected drawl of a reading. This assumes people only pay for audiobooks because they're too lazy to read.

I hope people will return those AI audiobooks. That may be the only way Amazon might learn.

The Difference?

[Mr_Blank]

Will the typical person be able to tell the difference between a human and AI voice reading the stories?

Certainly the best-sellers will retain humans, even famous humans, to read their books. But for the rest, AI could save them a lot of time and money.

Hopefully this technology will spread fast and then every book will be available with narration on many platforms. That would lead to price competition and competition for quality. Let the free market decide if this is a good idea or not.