Audible, the well-known audiobook service from Amazon, announced at the beginning of September 2024 the launch of a project involving a selected group of American narrators. These narrators will be invited to "train" artificial intelligence on their voices, thus creating vocal replicas that can be used for audiobook recordings. The initiative, which starts this week, aims to rapidly increase the number of audiobooks on the platform at low costs, while involving traditional narrators in the evolving world of voice automation, a topic that has been approached with caution so far.
Last year, Amazon began offering independent American authors who publish their books on the Kindle Store platform the opportunity to have their works narrated by a generic "virtual voice." This service has been very successful. By May of this year, over 40,000 books on Audible were reported to have been narrated using this technology. With the new initiative, Audible intends to further expand the possibilities by directly involving professional narrators in the use of these new synthetic voices.
Potential Opportunities for Professional Narrators
"This beta offer will allow participants to expand their capabilities in producing high-quality audiobooks, to accept multiple projects simultaneously, and to increase their earning potential," stated the company in a blog post.
Narrators who choose to participate will be able to create a replica of their own voice for free. Subsequently, they will receive compensation for each audiobook produced using their AI voice, with payments based on a royalty-sharing model for each title.
Audible's goal is to bring more exclusive content to its platform. A year after the introduction of virtual voice tools, 96% of self-published titles on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing still do not have an audio version, as reported by the company to Bloomberg News. Integrating a greater number of voices could improve this percentage.
Control and Flexibility for Narrators
Once the use of their AI voice for a specific project is approved, narrators will have the opportunity to modify pronunciation and narration pace using internal production tools provided by Audible. The company specified that vocal replicas will not be used without the explicit consent of the narrator.
"Narrators will continue to maintain control over the projects they wish to audition for, either using their replica voice or live performances, remaining central to the production process," Audible added in its post.
Conclusions – Threat or Opportunity?
This initiative marks a significant step in the evolution of the audiobook and voice automation world. While introducing innovative elements, Audible seems to want to reassure narrators that their role will remain essential. It will be interesting to see how the audiobook industry adapts to this new reality, and whether the collaboration between AI and narrators will indeed lead to a broader and more diverse production of audio content.
Source: Bloomberg/soundbite
