A well voiced audiobook is a thing of beauty indeed — an exciting, immersive experience. And a very human one. But narrators are about to feel the cold digital breath of AIs trained to narrate with naturalistic, believable voices.
Risks abound:
“But despite the positive impact AI voice generation can make, the technology is associated with numerous risks as well. Some of them include misuse, fraud, impersonation, and even voice theft, which especially affects professional voice actors.”
No doubt the initial results for multi-narrator audiobooks will be fairly primitive, but they will improve, and probably with startling speed. AI music is already flooding the streaming world, and real-life musicians aren’t getting much income out of that. Hollywood actors won some restrictions on the use of AI in their industry, but voice actors may not have quite as much clout.
Reedsy has a cheery article on optimal ways to use AI narrators. According to the writer:
“Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that the listener will get used to an AI voice after a few minutes and start accepting it as a real voice.”