Audible, Amazon’s audiobook service, announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with choose publishers to transform print and e-books into AI-narrated audiobooks. This initiative goals to shortly broaden its catalog because it competes with Apple, Spotify, and others within the quickly rising audiobook market.
Audible is leveraging Amazon’s AI capabilities to help publishers in producing audiobooks. Publishers can select from over 100 AI-generated voices out there in English, French, Spanish, and Italian, with a number of accents and dialect choices. The corporate plans to broaden these choices over time.
Moreover, Audible plans to roll out a beta model of AI translation later this yr, providing each text-to-text and speech-to-speech translation companies. This may help translations from English to Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Publishers can even have the choice to get assist from “skilled linguists” to evaluate these translations for accuracy, in response to the corporate.
In 2023, Amazon introduced an invite-only beta digital voice instrument for self-published authors within the U.S., enabling them to transform their e-books into audiobooks utilizing artificial speech tech. Final yr, Audible invited a cohort of audiobook narrators to coach AI on their voices.
A seek for “virtual voice” on Audible reveals over 50,000 titles labeled “Narrated By: Digital Voice,” indicating that the tech is widespread amongst authors who might not have the sources to supply their very own audiobooks.
Regardless of its widespread adoption, the introduction of AI-generated narrations has prompted debate throughout the publishing neighborhood and amongst listeners. Critics categorical issues that these AI recordings would possibly compromise the general high quality of audiobooks.
Spotify, the second-largest audiobook supplier after Audible, has additionally lately made efforts to broaden its audiobook library by using AI narration instruments. The platform partnered with the AI audio supplier ElevenLabs in February.