The Audible platform already has more than 50,000 books read by voices created by an AI
Converting a book into an audiobook is not an easy task. Or rather, it was not, because generative artificial intelligence models have now allowed this task to be automated and the results are notable.
Virtual voices for authors. This is demonstrated by what has happened at Amazon. As noted in Bloomberg, the company announced last year that authors who self-publish their books in the Kindle Store in the United States could access a new tool in beta phase. One that, thanks to AI, could generate a “virtual voice” to convert them into audiobooks and offer them on Audible.
50,000 audiobooks in no time. In the few months since it was launched, authors have taken advantage of this option and now more than 50,000 books have been created with the system. They are all labeled with “virtual voice”, and the artificial intelligence system is very simple and fast to use… as well as free.
Significant savings of time and money. Some authors are very happy with this new option from Amazon. Hassan Osman, author of one of those books, explained that it costs him between $500 and $700 to hire someone to turn his book into an audiobook and it usually takes about three or four weeks to have that audiobook ready. With AI you can do it for free and it took 52 minutes to have the audiobook published and for sale. It wasn’t perfect, he admits, but the result was remarkable and the time and money savings even more so.
Complaints. Despite this, some Audible customers would like to be able to find books that have not precisely been converted into audiobooks with those virtual voices. One of these users https://twitter.com/ghoshworld/status/1770818536576868506 that there seems to be a preference for showing those types of audiobooks, and there is no search option that avoids those results and shows audiobooks created by humans.
Another job that AI takes away from us. Others https://twitter.com/worldlibraries/status/1779755517071790421 again the threat that AI poses to the professionals who carried out this task, and who can now be replaced by artificial intelligence. It is something that has already been seen in the world of video game illustration in China, and that is little by little moving to other creative and business fields. A professional narrator, Ramón de Ocampo, https://twitter.com/ramondeocampo/status/1736560180559495240 that “[la IA] “He hasn’t taken all the jobs, but he’s trying.”
ElevenLabs is the other threat. As if that were not enough, the synthetic voices generated by companies like ElevenLabs are increasingly spectacular, and allow the voices of anyone, narrators and actors included, to be imitated with astonishing precision. That could make these professionals try to fight against random virtual voice narrations so that at least the authors choose a cloned (licensed) virtual voice of someone they know. HarperCollins has already reached an agreement with that company to create audiobooks in different languages with that technology.
The AI that wrote and narrated books. This new phenomenon joins the one we already saw with books written and published directly by AI systems. In recent months, the avalanche of new titles created with AI has been such that Amazon had to introduce a limitation so that so many would not appear in its catalog. Something similar could happen with audiobooks if in the end the books written by AI also end up being offered as audiobooks through these systems.
Image | Jukka Aalho
In Xataka | In Oslo there is a library where books are being written with one condition: that they not be read for 90 years.
