Audiook has saved my sanctity on many long traffic and has been a great company when I am cleaning or doing other work. When the performance is good, it is easy to fall into the story. The audience wants the writer and his readers to embrace AI as an alternative to human statement, but I suspect. Audible is providing access to the publishers perfectly integrated AI production pipeline. This includes auto-generating entire audiooks with synthetic sounds.
Their pitch is appealing to the surface: there are millions of books, and only one of them makes it in audio anytime. Creating audibook is expensive, time consuming, and it includes real people who need to pay appropriately for their time. An AI narrator is sharp, cheap, and many people cannot even notice that it is not a human performance.
But “good enough” art should not be standard, and audiobooks are very high art forms. The great statement adds depth, color, rhythm and even new meaning to a lesson. It reads loudly with words on a page that you can hear for real performance. Even if AI gets closer in a technical sense, and I have heard AI audio that matches a human performance for at least a few minutes, we will still know the difference.
There are nuances in the human statement because it references. The narrator not only understands the definition of words that they are saying, but the feeling and history behind them. They know the difference between a sigh of relief and the breath of resignation. AI can approximate those sounds, sometimes surprisingly, but it is like a pet trick. A dog can cover its eyes, but it is not really the dog feeling embarrassed.
The more AI voices fill our earbuds, the more we do something of the most intimate forms of storytelling that makes the robot, flat and erylee feel lifeless. It is like auto-tuning. It can hit the correct notes, but it does not sing.
Ai story needs
All that said, I am not against using AI for audibook in the right setting. Like any technology, it is about how the AI statement is deployed, not it exists. Many books and new people are emerging all the time. If you are an independent writer who has no budget to appoint a narrator, or a publisher with a publisher who has not touched anyone in a decade, the AI statement can breathe life in your books.
Synthetic sounds do not change anything in those contexts; They only provide access. And an AI voice can complement human readers with a multi-round performance if you use the self-service version of the ADIL’s AI statement forum. Using AI for supplementing instead of changing all human voices seems like a better option for me.
One area that I am doing for AI Voice is translating texts. The audible is a beta test for the AI-powered translation devices that can bring books to people unable to understand them in their native language. If there is anything worse than a great book, which is not an audibook, it is a great book that is not accessible in your language. Audible is starting the program by offering to translate English books in Spanish, French, German and Italian.
Translation service can only translate the text and then give new work an AI narrator, but whatever is interesting for me is speech-to-skit mode. This means that an audibook made by a human in English can be repeated in a different language, looking like a original artist.
The narrator of a bestseling English audibook can now “speak” the fluent Spanish in his voice, present that story to new audiences around the world. My favorite way to think about how to use AI is. It can expand the access to art without diluting its heart.
It is not the same as the original, human statement, but it is a solution to a problem. This is how the audio should pitch the AI audibook. We should use the AI statement to make books accessible. But if it is possible to give it a human touch, it should be the first idea.
It is important not to lose how this AI audibook shift affects artists who often make careers that give their voice to other people’s stories. If AI begins to meet the middleist titles, the budget-conscious publishers may no longer see any reason for the real readers to be hired. AI does not need to be an enemy. But it should not be default.
