Ai -story from Audible sounds impressive, but I prefer to hear the story told by a person
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Audio books have saved my common sense on a lot of long living traffic and have been great company while I am cleaning or doing other chores. If the implementation is good, it is easy to fall into the story. Audible wants authors and their readers to embrace AI as an alternative to human story, but I am skeptical. Audible offers publishers access to a fully integrated AI production pipeline. This includes the automatic generation of entire audio books with synthetic voices.
Their pitch is attractive on the surface: there are millions of books that are there, and only a piece of them ever comes to the audio. Making audio books is expensive, time -consuming and concerns real people who have to be paid honestly for their time. An AI narrator is faster, cheaper and many people may not even notice that it is not a person.
But “good enough” should not be the standard for art, and audio books are very much an art form. Great story adds depth, color, rhythm and even new meaning to a text. It transforms reading words on a page that you can hear to a real achievement. Even if AI gets close in a technical sense and I have heard AI -Audio that matches a human performance for at least a few minutes, we still know the difference.
Human story has nuance because it has context. The narrator not only understands the definition of the words they say, but also the emotion and history behind them. They know the difference between a sigh of relief and a sigh of dismissal. AI can approach those sounds, sometimes amazing, but it is like a trick for pets. A dog can cover his eyes, but that is actually not the dog that is ashamed.
The more AI voices our earplugs fill, the more we run the risk of making one of the most intimate forms of stories in something that feels robot -like, flat and creepy lifeless. It is a lullaby as an automatic coordination. It can hit the right notes, but it doesn’t sing.
Ai -tell
That said, I am not against the use of AI for audio books in the right setting. Like any technology, it is about how AI story is used, not if it exists. There are so many books and new ones that always come up. If you are an independent author without a budget to hire a storyteller, or a publisher with a shelf of titles that no one has touched in a decade, AI story can bring in your books.
Synthetic voices do not replace anything in those contexts; They just offer access. And an AI voice could supplement human readers with a multi-voice performance if you use the self-service version of the AI-story platform from AudIble. Using ai to supplement instead of replacing all human voices feels like a better option for me.
An area that I am all on for AI Voices is translating texts. AudIble has a beta test for AI-driven translation tools that can bring books to people they cannot understand in their original language. If there is something worse than a great book that has no audio book, it is a great book that is not accessible in your language. Audible starts the program by offering to translate English books into Spanish, French, German and Italian.
The translation service can easily translate text and then give the new work an AI narrator, but what is more interesting for me is the speech-to-speech mode. That means that an audio book can be replicated in English in English in another language while it sounds like the original artist.
The narrator of a bestseller English audio book could now “speak” Spanish in their own voice, which introduces that story to new listeners around the world. That is my favorite way to think about using AI. It can expand the reach of art without diluting its heart.
It is not entirely the same as original, human story, but it is a solution to a problem. That is how audible AI audio books should pitch. We must absolutely use AI story 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 AI -Audioboek shift influences the artists who often build a career that give their voice to the stories of other people. When AI starts storing the Midlist titles, budget-conscious publishers may not see any reason to hire real readers. Ai does not have to be the enemy. But it shouldn’t be the standard.
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