The audiobooks have saved my sanity on many long trips and have been a great company while I am cleaning or doing other tasks. When the performance is good, it is easy to fall into history. Audible wants the authors and their readers to adopt AI as an alternative to human narration, but I am skeptical. Audible offers editors access to a fully integrated AI production pipe. That includes entire automatic generation audiobooks with synthetic voices.
Its tone is attractive on the surface: there are millions of books out there, and only one splinter reaches the audio. Doing audiobooks is expensive, which requires a lot of time and involves real people who need to receive a fair payment for their time. An AI narrator is faster, cheaper and many people may not notice that it is not a human performance.
But “good enough” should not be the standard for art, and audiobooks are largely an art form. The great narrative adds depth, color, rhythm and even a new meaning for a text. Transforms the reading aloud of the words into a page that can listen to a real performance. Even if AI is approaching in a technical sense, and I have heard audio that coincides with human performance for at least a few minutes, we will still know the difference.
Human narration has nuances because it has context. The narrator includes not only the definition of the words they are saying, but the emotion and history behind them. They know the difference between a relief sigh and a renunciation sigh. AI can approximate those sounds, sometimes incredibly, but it's like a pet trick. A dog can cover his eyes, but that is not really the dog feels ashamed.
The more voices our headphones are filled, the more we ran the risk of converting one of the most intimate forms of narration into something that feels robotic, flat and lifeless. It is like an automatic adjustment of a cradle song. It can reach the right notes, but it does not sing.
AI narration needs
Said all this, I am not against using AI for audiobooks in the correct configuration. Like any technology, it is about how AI's narration is implemented, not if it exists. There are so many books and new ones that emerge all the time. If you are an independent author without a budget to hire a narrator, or an editor with a title shelf that no one has played in a decade, Ai Narration could give life to your books.
Synthetic voices do not replace anything in those contexts; They simply provide access. And a voice of AI could complement human readers with a multiple voice performance if you use the Ai -Ai Ai Narration Platform version. Using AI to complement instead of replacing all human voices feels like a better option for me.
An area where I am in the AI voices is to translate texts. Audible has a beta test for translation tools with AI who could bring books to people who cannot understand them in their original language. If there is something worse than a great book that does not have an audiobook, it is a great book that cannot be accessed in its language. Audible is starting the program offering translating books in English into Spanish, French, German and Italian.
The translation service can simply translate text and then give the new work an AI narrator, but what is more interesting for me is the voice to voice. That means that an audiobook made by a human in English could be replicated in a different language while it sounds like the original artist.
The narrator of a best -selling English audiobook could now “speak” Spanish fluently in his own voice, presenting that story to new listeners around the world. That is my favorite way of thinking about how to use AI. It can expand the scope of art without diluting your heart.
It is not the same as original human narration, but it is a solution to a problem. This is how audible must launch AI Ai. We should absolutely use AI's narration to make books accessible. But if it is possible to give it a human touch, that should be the first thought.
It is important not to lose sight of how this change of audiobook of AI affects artists who often build careers that lend their voices to other people's stories. If AI begins to engulf titles from the middle list, the conscious editors of the budget may not see any reason to hire real readers. Ai does not have to be the enemy. But it should not be the default value.
