I’ve been thinking about AI and audiobooks ever since Google’s auto-narrated audiobooks became a thing. I checked them out way back when and then proceeded to do nothing for a while for various reasons.
AI in the creative space has been A LOT, and it will only continue to be more A LOT. There are many aspects of it I find scary, but I also don’t see it going away. Having said that, I think there are potentially some good aspects, too. In the case of Google’s auto-narrated audiobooks, I’m currently optimistic. While I’d appreciate more transparency on how Google’s AI voices are trained, I’m going forward with the belief they’ve been trained with permission. I’ve researched and read what I could find on Google’s page, and Joanna Penn did a helpful interview in which there is a quote:
“Every single one of our narrators that we have today, our teams, mainly with Google Assistant, has met in person, they recorded in studio, and they signed a very specific agreement to say, ‘Hey, we can use these samples to record and improve a text-to-speech model.'”
To listen to that podcast episode or read the transcript, click here.
Now let’s talk about the potential benefits of AI narrated audiobooks. Most books are never going to be released in audio because it’s expensive. Now, this isn’t me saying narrators don’t deserve to be paid well. They deserve every penny they get because, let me tell you, making an audiobook is a heck of a lot of work. I should know. I’ve done it myself. In fact, I’m doing more of it, but I’m not narrating all of my books because it takes me a long time since I’m not recording/editing audio full time. I mean, my job is WRITING books.
If it’s financially impossible or too time intensive for most books to be made into audio, where does that leave readers who need audio? Text-to-speech is helpful, but it’s also… not fantastic. If you have fantasy words or odd online names like in my most recent series, it will stumble badly. It can be choppy, hard to understand. Google’s auto-narrated audiobooks are MUCH better. I can edit how words are pronounced, and the voices themselves are quite smooth and easy to listen to. An audiobook can be made in a relatively short amount of time. These AI voices don’t have the powerful performance a good narrator has, but that’s just as well.
There are regular audiobooks, where usually a single narrator gives you their best performance, and there are graphic audiobooks, where you get an entire cast and even sound effects. In the case of these two formats, a reader who buys a graphic audiobook is doing it entirely for the performance. And that’s great! It’s like paperbacks, hardbacks, special editions—art is wonderful and should be expressed in every form. But sometimes it just needs to be accessible.
eBooks are inexpensive and convenient. AI-narrated audiobooks can accomplish the same thing.
I’ve decided to create some auto-narrated audiobooks for stories that I’m not planning to narrate myself but also don’t make enough money to pay a narrator. These audiobooks will be priced the same as their eBook counterparts (on the retailers where I’m able to set the prices). I hope these auto-narrated audiobooks will be helpful to readers who need them or simply prefer them. I’ll also always tell you if a book has been narrated by an AI voice.
That’s where I currently stand, but I have the right to change my mind!
