Audiobooks are a booming business, but it's impossible to imagine high-quality performers reading every book ever written out loud. To try to fill that gap, Audible, Amazon's audiobook arm, is testing out using voice clones produced with AI to speed up the process. The idea of a massive increase in books with an audio format has obvious appeal but immediately begs the question of whether they would be able to match a human performance, or whether it's worth pursuing even if they can.
The program, in beta in the U.S., is for a group of current Audible narrators to create voice clones using AI trained on samples of their speech. They will then be able to plug these AI replicas into their book recordings. The AI voice won't just be a plug-in for certain chapters and passages, either. Narrators can edit their AI voices to fix pronunciation, slow down or speed up the pacing, and then review the final production to ensure accuracy, just as they would in a live reading.
