Audible, Amazon Audiobook Service, announced Tuesday who is collaborating with selected publishers to convert the printing and e-books to AudioLibri narrated to the. This initiative aims to quickly expand its catalog as it competes with Apple, Spotify and others in the rapidly growing audiobook market.
Audible is exploiting the features of Ai Amazon to help publishers produce audiobooks. Publishers can choose from over 100 voices generated by the AI available in English, French, Spanish and Italian, with more accents and dialectic options. The company plans to expand these options over time.
In addition, the audible plans to launch a beta version of AI translation by the end of the year, offering translation services both text to a speech and vocal. This will support translations from English to Spanish, French, Italian and German. The publishers will also have the opportunity to obtain help from “professional linguists” to review these translations for accuracy, according to society.
In 2023, Amazon introduced a virtual vocal Beta vocal tool only invitation for self-public authors in the United States, allowing them to convert their e-books to audiobooks using the synthetic speech technology. Last year, Audible invited a cohort of audiobook narrators to train the IA on their voices.
A search for “virtual voice” on Audible reveals over 50,000 titles labeled “Narrated by: Virtual Voice”, indicating that technology is popular among the authors who may not have the resources to produce their audiobooks.
Despite his widespread adoption, the introduction of narratives generated by the AI has pushed the debate within the editorial community and among the listeners. Critics express concerns for the fact that these artificial intelligence recordings could compromise the overall quality of audiobooks.
Spotify, the second largest audiobook provider after Audible, has also recently made efforts to expand its audiobook library using artificial intelligence narration tools. The platform collaborated with the audio provider in the Elevenlabs in February.
