“With the current crop of high-end synthetic voices, 95% of people would not recognize that they’re artificially generated,” he says. “The way that an audiobook narrator will read an audiobook, for example, is totally different to how one would answer a simple question such as ‘What time is it?’ In a book, you might need a news reader voice, an excited voice, a sad voice, a slow voice, a fast voice, a high-pitched voice, and you might need all of this on a single page.”īradley Metrock, CEO of Project Voice and of Digital Book World, has a different perspective. “To create a synthetic voice that is capable of holding human attention for long periods of time-that’s quite a challenge,” Simms says. The problem has been that a voice that sounds lifelike when it announces the weather doesn’t necessarily sound so lifelike after an hour of narration. With that as a goal, making this same technology work for long audio, such as audiobooks, seems like a logical next step. And not just one voice but, as we see (and hear) with Siri and Google Assistant, multiple voices. The holy grail has been to make their voices indistinguishable from human voices. The perfect application for this has been voicebots on smartphones and voice assistants in the home. Text to speech (TTS) creates artificially generated audio that sounds like a person talking. Google’s Assistant easily accesses the text of millions of books scanned and indexed via Google Books.

Siri knows stuff because Siri is reading from Wikipedia. Underneath digital voice audio is text-text converted to speech. Jackson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Melissa McCarthy.” “You only need to listen to some of the celebrity Alexa voices, including Samuel L. “There’s been some really good breakthroughs in text to speech becoming more humanlike over the last couple of years,” says Kane Simms, founder of VUX World. Hey Siri, you almost single-handedly created a demand for user-selected artificial voices. Today’s focus on the AI-enabled auto-narration of audiobooks is fostered by the same technology that taught Siri to speak and Alexa to listen. A few new startups claim to be able to produce audiobooks in days or even hours, rather than months. The value proposition for automated audiobook creation becomes a combination of cost and convenience, where convenience is a combination of both simplifying and vastly accelerating the production process. How about creating the audiobook for $500? Or less? Wouldn’t it be great if publishers could get rid of “the talent” and reduce the long production cycles, push a button, and, presto, an instant audiobook, ready for sale? For smaller publishers and for authors with modest sales, it unquestionably would be. Outright fees are negotiable.įindaway, another company with an ACX-style hybrid model, notes that the “average audiobook created with Findaway Voices has about 50,000 words and costs between $1,000 and $2,000.” With a royalty share, the (often self-published) author finds a voice actor willing to invest their time and talent in the project, in exchange for perhaps 20% of the royalties. A significant factor in the cost is the talent: brand-name talent is paid $1,000 or more per finished hour (PFH) of the audiobook, and with studio time and post-production added, the cost climbs quickly.Īt the other end of the spectrum, audiobooks created with Amazon/Audible’s ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) can be priced with two models: royalty share or a fee. The traditional process can take two hours or more in the studio for one finished hour, and the average audiobook is eight hours long. Producing audiobooks is expensive, so the appeal of automating audiobook creation is easy to understand. Introducing AI-enabled automated audiobook creation. One thing hasn’t changed, however: the arduous production process for audiobooks.īut what if it could be done in a fraction of the time, weeks instead of months? And what if it could be done for a fraction of the cost, hundreds of dollars instead of thousands? The percentage of Americans 18 and older who have listened to an audiobook is now 46%, up from 44% in 2019. Sales in 2020 exceeded $1.3 billion, up 12% over 2019. Could this be magic? Over the past decade, audiobook sales, driven by digital audio, have exploded.

Audio book reader alexa