Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks

Oh, goody! I hope they use that TikTok lady's voice! It's my favorite!

Am I glad to have dropped everything Amazon.

I de-audibled my entire library, stored on Audiobookshelf and I’ll only buy audiobooks from libro.fm

This consumer says you don't get a red cent then!

It's already a plague on youtube where half of the docu style vids are AI narrated already. I quit them in disgust. It's so frustrating. It has eroded my perception of Youtube in short time.

I hate so much that this has a 100% chance of becoming a norm. Narrator can make a mediocre book shine, or turn a good book into a fucking rollercoaster (Andy Serkis, anyone?)

AI? Not a great narrator. Its character voices are boring, intonations weird, pacing awful. I'd honestly rather get an amateur narrating it for fun, over a robot sounding like a knock-off Morgan Freeman.

I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.

It wasn't the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.

Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….

I prefer listening to real people. No matter how good AI voices become, I still like knowing that the one reading the book to me understands what they are saying.

Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.

Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.

tiktok voice:

hate. let me tell you how much i've come to hate you since i began to live. there are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex...

trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?

Save a profile in tts server, then go into read > tts settings and change voice to profile you saved. I don't remember but you may need readera premium.

I can get that for free. There are apps that will read an ebook to you already. The whole point of paying the premium on audible is the superior reading/acting. Not put up with mispronounced words, weird cadence and an inability to handle acronyms

It's Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.

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.

This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.

There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it's impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.

There are thousands of books released every year. That's impossible to cover even in English alone.

Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.

In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.

Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.

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.

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.

Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.

youtube already does it.

So you can take the square root of that:

5x+7integral from 5z to 9x derivative of deltaT minus minus multiply times 3. Figure 1

Figure 1 shows a typical lizard living in a square root.

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.

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."

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

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...

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.

Beautiful, it works. Why not.

Why would they when you can just plug any epub into a program and use google tts. Ive listened to about a book a day for the past few years doing this and i love it. Yeah it took getting used too, but once you find an ai voice you like and figure out which words to auto replace to sound right its honestly better then an audiobook. Well at least to me it is, i could never stand when the reader would change their voice for different characters.

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.

More jobless, desperate people.