AI Software Rapidly Hitting the Mainstream

Synthetic voices have been proliferating for years, and the generative AI boom of the new ’20s has sped that process right along. AI voices are everywhere—in podcasts, in political campaigns, and in chatbots where they maybe-not-so-subtly replicate celebrity voices. Soon, they’ll be all up in your audiobooks too.

Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company, announced a trial program for generating AI voice clones to read works in its audiobook marketplace. The announcement came via a post in ACX—Audiobook Creation Exchange—Audible’s service that lets authors and publishers turn written books into audiobooks.

“We're taking measured steps to test new technologies to help expand our catalog,” says the post, “and this week we are inviting a small group of narrators to participate in a US-only beta enabling them to create and monetize replicas of their own voices using AI-generated speech technology.”

Audible says both the narrators and authors will have control over which projects their AI voices are used for and that final narrations will be reviewed as part of ACX’s production process to check for mispronunciations or other errors.

Still, this might seem a tad incongruous with Audible’s current approach to narrated audiobooks, given that even after this announcement, ACX’s submission requirements still say that audiobook narrations, “must be narrated by a human.” But Amazon has already been bullish on AI, and implemented a similar AI audio program for its Kindle direct publishing operation last year.

Right now the Audible program is limited, with a select group of narrators participating. But it’s easy to see where this could go from here, and soon Audible could be opened up to let any author capable of generating an AI voice that can read their own book. Other companies are playing in this space as well; the startup Rebind is enlisting authors to allow their voices to be cloned so an AI version of them can “guide” readers through their texts. Fans of audiobooks are on the fence about all of it.

Personally, I cannot wait until these dulcet yet uncanny voices fall into the hands of the dinosaur eroticists.