Technology

More jobless, desperate people.

This is dumb as hell... if I wanted AI to read a book poorly to me, I'd just use screen reading accessibility features.

I only get the ones with a famous narrator or the author.

I will Avoid Audio books with AI voices. I prefer the warmth of a human voice instead. A lot of my favorite Audiobooks are elevated by the interpretation of the professional actor. I am glad I have never even touched the Audible service, now I never will. I will also never consume anything written by a fucking AI.

No publisher is going to pay a professional to narrate their audiobooks when they can have AI do a shitty job for much less.

A shitty narrator can get me to hate a book I like. A great narrator can bring the characters to life, enhance the experience, and turn me from a listener to a fan. I've searched for books by narrators like Nick Podehl and Jeff Hayes and bought audiobooks I wouldn't have otherwise.

For now at least I bet this’ll be pretty mediocre. I’m a big audiobook fan and voice actors have a massive impact on the quality of the finished product. A great voice actor can make a mediocre book fun and engaging, a bad one can make a great book unlistenable. The best do great voice differentiation. As an example I’ve really enjoyed Andrea Parsneau’s work in The Wandering Inn series.

AI voice synth is pretty solidly-useful in comparison to, say, video generation from scratch. I think that there are good uses for voice synth

e.g. filling in for an aging actor/actress who can't do a voice any more, video game mods, procedurally-generated speech, etc

but audiobooks don't really play to those strengths. I'm a little skeptical that in 2025, it's at the point where it's a good drop-in replacement for audiobooks. What I've heard still doesn't have emphasis on par with a human.

I don't know what it costs to have a human read an audiobook, but I can't imagine that it's that expensive; I doubt that there's all that much editing involved.

kagis

https://www.reddit.com/r/litrpg/comments/1426xav/whats_the_average_narrator_cost/

So I produced my own audiobooks for my Nova Roma series so I know the exact numbers for you:

$250 per finished hour for the narrator. Books ranged from about 200k words-270k words, which came out to 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.

So books 1-3 cost me $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250. I'm contracted for two more books with my narrator, so I expect to spend another 5k-6k for each of those.

So for a five book series, each one 200k+ words, the total cost out of pocket for me will be about $27,000 give or take to make the series into audiobooks.

That's actually lower than I expected. Like, if a book sells at any kind of volume, it can't be that hard to make that back.

EDIT: I can believe that it's possible to build a speech synth system that does do better, mind

I certainly don't think that there are any fundamental limitations on this. It'd guess that there's also room for human-assisted stuff, where you have some system that annotates the text with emphasis markers, and the annotated text gets fed into a speech synth engine trained to convert annotated text to voice. There, someone listens to the output and just tweaks the annotated text where the annotation system doesn't get it quite right. But I don't think that we're really there today yet.

AI will write them and AI will read them to us.

I just wrote a novel (finished first draft yesterday). There's no way I can afford professional audiobook voice actors—especially for a hobby project.

What I was planning on doing was handling the audiobook on my own—using an AI voice changer for all the different characters.

That's where I think AI voices can shine: If someone can act they can use a voice changer to handle more characters and introduce a great variety of different styles of speech while retaining the careful pauses and dramatic elements (e.g. a voice cracking during an emotional scene) that you'd get from regular voice acting.

I'm not saying I will be able to pull that off but surely it will be better than just telling Amazon's AI, "Hey, go read my book."

Fucking gross. Maybe it's the 250+ audiobooks I have influencing me, but the very best ones I've listened to transcend just turning words into sound. Sound effects, music, tone, emotion, accents, sarcasm, and god damn BLOOPERS all improve the experience beyond just hearing what is written down.

I'm against it, fuck that literal noise.

I am okay with this only in cases where 1) the author approves, and 2) there is no audible version anyways.

Some people prefer listening to their books instead of reading and that's totally ok. Indie authors can't always afford to hire a narrator but I'd still want the buyers to be able to listen to the book.

Big question is, will the author get paid for the download or not...

It was bound to happen. I'm okay with ones that were never going to be turned into audiobooks to begin with... but they likely will use that as the norm for all books... I guess unless the author/publisher says not to.