Audibles AI narration sounds impressive, but I'd rather hear the story told
by a human

Date:
Wed, 14 May 2025 21:00:00 +0000

Description:
Audible's AI narration is here, but is best used for translation and not when unnecessary.

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Audiobooks have saved my sanity on many long commutes and have been great company while I'm cleaning or doing other chores. When the performance is good, it's easy to fall into the story. Audible wants authors and their readers to embrace AI as an alternative to human narration, but I am skeptical. Audible is offering publishers access to a fully integrated AI production pipeline. That includes auto-generating entire audiobooks with synthetic voices.

Their pitch is appealing on the surface: there are millions of books out there, and only a sliver of them ever make it into audio. Making audiobooks
is expensive, time-consuming, and involves real people who need to be paid fairly for their time. An AI narrator is faster, cheaper, and a lot of people might not even notice it's not a human performing.

But "good enough" shouldn't be the standard for art, and audiobooks are very much an art form. Great narration adds depth, color, rhythm, and even new meaning to a text. It transforms reading aloud from words on a page you can hear to a real performance. Even if AI gets close in a technical sense, and I've heard AI audio that matches a human performance for at least a few minutes, well still know the difference.

Human narration has nuance because it has context. The narrator understands not just the definition of the words they're saying, but the emotion and history behind them. They know the difference between a sigh of relief and a sigh of resignation. AI can approximate those sounds, sometimes amazingly so, but it's like a pet trick. A dog can cover its eyes, but that's not actually the dog feeling embarrassed.

The more AI voices fill our earbuds, the more we risk turning one of the most intimate forms of storytelling into something that feels robotic, flat, and eerily lifeless. Its like auto-tuning a lullaby. It might hit the right
notes, but it doesnt sing. AI narration needs

All of that said, I'm not against using AI for audiobooks in the right setting. Like any technology, it's about how AI narration is deployed, not whether it exists. There are so many books and new ones emerging all the
time. If youre an independent author with no budget to hire a narrator, or a publisher with a shelf of titles no one has touched in a decade, AI narration could breathe life into your books.

Synthetic voices dont replace anything in those contexts; they just provide access. And an AI voice could supplement human readers with a multi-voice performance if you use the self-service version of Audible's AI narration platform. Using AI to supplement rather than replace all human voices feels like a better option to me.

One area I'm all in on for AI voices is translating texts. Audible has a beta test for AI-powered translation tools that could bring books to people unable to understand them in their original language. If theres anything worse than a great book not having an audiobook, its a great book not being accessible
in your language. Audible is starting the program by offering to translate English books into Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

The translation service can simply translate text and then give the new work an AI narrator, but what is more interesting to me is the speech-to-speech mode. That means an audiobook performed by a human in English could be replicated in a different language while sounding like the original
performer.

The narrator of a bestselling English audiobook could now speak fluent
Spanish in their own voice, introducing that story to new listeners around
the world. Thats my favorite way to think about how to use AI. It can expand the reach of art without diluting its heart.

It's not quite the same as original, human narration, but it's a solution to
a problem. That's how Audible should pitch AI audiobooks. We should
absolutely use AI narration to make books accessible. But if it's possible to give it a human touch, that should be the first thought.

It's important not to lose sight of how this AI audiobook shift affects the performers who often build careers lending their voices to other peoples stories. If AI starts gobbling up midlist titles, budget-conscious publishers might see no reason to hire real readers anymore. AI doesnt have to be the enemy. But it shouldnt be the default. You might also like Your next audiobook's big twist might be that the narrator... is a (voice) clone! The
AI That Cried AAAAAAHHH! How you can get (AI versions of) Judy Garland or
Burt Reynolds to read to you This app can add AI narration to any site or
text here's how to make it work



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/audibles-ai-narrat ion-sounds-impressive-but-id-rather-hear-the-story-told-by-a-human


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