Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks

No publisher is going to pay a professional to narrate their audiobooks when they can have AI do a shitty job for much less.
A shitty narrator can get me to hate a book I like. A great narrator can bring the characters to life, enhance the experience, and turn me from a listener to a fan. I've searched for books by narrators like Nick Podehl and Jeff Hayes and bought audiobooks I wouldn't have otherwise.
- That depends entirely on how profitable it is and how much they can get authors onboard.
  I do agree that a good narrator delivers a performance that adds the work. James Marster will always be Harry Dresden in my head.
  
  That depends entirely on how profitable it is and how much they can get authors onboard.
  A. Anything can be profitable when the cost to generation will be counted in singles of dollars instead of multiple thousands for a good narrator. They don't even have to sell many to turn a profit too.
  B. You think authors are going to have a choice? Lmfao. It's the publishers that hold any real power and they will jump all over everyone's IP with AI slop to make an extra three cents.
- I tried, and failed, to get into audio books for years. Then I listened to Dungeon Crawler Carl narrated by Jeff Hayes and what an absolute delight it was. There's no way I would've gotten even 10 minutes in if it was one of those soulless AI voices instead.
  
  Currently listening to the first book.
- I made some AI animated content that I never released because I don't have the rights to the voices I was using. Even though I was blending several voices together to make them unrecognizable, it made me uncomfortable.
  But in the process I learned the capabilities and limitations of AI voices. If you're going purely from text to speech, it's horrendous (as far as I experienced). Very robotic. It's a bit better when melodic information is included (as in Suno) but still sounds like AI.
  But when I recorded my own voice saying the lines and then converted it to another voice, it took all of the nuance of my line reads and converted it into the other voice.
  So, would your opinion change if it turns out they're going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?
  I could see how it would allow lesser known books to have a better experience with a truly separate voice for each character, but I could also see how this might drive out lesser known/minority voice actors. Not advocating one way or another, just providing a piece of this conversation I think we should bear in mind.
  
  So, would your opinion change if it turns out they’re going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?
  It would make me hate it even more because I already hate the existing full cast of humans audio dramas 99% of the time and actually prefer a single (or low number of) narrator approach.
  
  Oh. That’s an interesting use-case I hadn’t considered.
  
  Using different voices to read different parts of a book turns an audiobook into a bad audio play, and arguably, a bad audio play is worse than a mediocre audio book.
  What audible misses is, that, while reading is a technique that can be automated, narrating is an art. They can use AI to read books, they cannot use AI to narrate books.
  Your example of AI use is a good example of this: AI can read your content. AI can enhance your capabilities. But only you can narrate it.
- Honestly audible are terribles. They are constantly doing things that annoy me, like they must have a team somewhere that spends its days going, how can we kill this golden goose?
  They are going through and replacing audiobooks recorded in the 1980s with new ones which in theory should improve their quality but they're getting rid of the classic sounds of those books.
  
  like they must have a team somewhere that spends its days going, how can we kill this golden goose?
  I wouldn't put it past Bezos to have an actual enshittification department.
- Maybe we'll start reading again.
  
  There is literally zero shame in someone consuming audiobooks, and it’s deeply weird to act like something is lost to you if others enjoy them. And this is coming from someone who virtually never listens to audiobooks.
- Nick Podehl is such an amazing narrator. The voices and performance are amazing.
  I've been slowly getting through the Kel Kade books and the narration just makes it for me
- A shitty narrator can get me to hate a book I like.
  And that is where I see potential for AI. There are quite a few books which I’d love to listen to but they are all narrated by a guy whose narration I can’t stand. AI would open the possibility to choose a voice and I might actually get to enjoy those books. It’s Amazon though so the ethical implications and quality concerns are something I’m worried about.
  
  Did you ever heard a single AI-narrated content that did not make you run away screaming?
- I'm not sure why AI would automatically mean it's doing a shitty job.
  
  Because... the tool has no understanding of anything? It reads written words, yes, but no intention, no cultural context, no intonation. Unless everything is spelled out like a script, then it will not sound great, would it?
- The thing with this is that there won't be shitty narrations any more. Hate it all you may, fact of the matter is that AI-powered voice generation is pretty good at what it does. So in the future you won't have shitty narrations and great narrations. You'll have decent narrations and great (human) narrations.
  
  And teslas will have full self driving tomorrow and crypto currency will replace normal currency within one year! Always believe in the hype!

I can get that for free. There are apps that will read an ebook to you already. The whole point of paying the premium on audible is the superior reading/acting. Not put up with mispronounced words, weird cadence and an inability to handle acronyms
- I've tried one that works surprisingly well. Each sentence had great pacing, cadence, and correct enunciation- even had tone right when someone was shouting or angry or sad.
  I wouldn't really recommend it, though. While I couldn't pick any single thing out that was wrong, overall it just didn't quite flow. It's like watching someone try to act that is technically doing everything right, but it just isn't good. It basically didn't understand the greater context of the story and was saying lines.
  It was uncanny valley, but exclusively with voice.
- I thought people mainly paid for the large library
- Is there an offline tool that generates realistic audio for epubs as Mp3 ? Something like the free Ai tool, Vibe which is for transcription. Is there something similar for TTS, runs locally without complicated setup ( most are complicated using python and etc just for installation)
  edit: needs to be close to realistic or at least accurate pronunciation because I am using the audio from books to learn languages. To improve listening comprehension while reading book.
  
  I've loaded epubs into the app ReadEra, which lets you read it like any other novel app or will, in real time, read it to you. It's not the most natural of speech, but was good enough for my commute when I was in the midst of a compelling book.
  
  Great question! I need to come back to this thread to see if something is suggested.
- Looking for iOS recommendations, preferably without a subscription that can read epub/pdf
  
  I'm an android user, so not sure if it's on iOS but I've used ReadEra

This is dumb as hell... if I wanted AI to read a book poorly to me, I'd just use screen reading accessibility features.
- Are there any good ones nowadays that don't sound like a robot?
  
  Sure there are. ElevenLabs is one. You can probably tell they’re not human but they’re really decent.
  
  Speechify is probably the best option.
  
  No

trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
- This has actually got me thinking differently about AI all together.
  The best use for AI needs to be for the individual. I want MY ai to read books or research with or complete tasks for me.
  I don’t want another company to do it for me or monetize it or steal content with it.
- Yep, copyright doesn't apply to AI generated content.
  https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-copyrights-ai-generated-art-lacking-human-creator-2025-03-18/#%3A%7E%3Atext=U.S.+Circuit+Judge+Patricia+Millett+wrote+for%2Cthe+first+instance+by+a+human+being.%22
  
  free AI read audiobooks coming up
- AI voices are not trained on books.
  The ethical issue there is more around cloning celebrities
  https://open.spotify.com/show/03fNX9EtXbfyVzR4z122Ir
  
  but AI itself is
- Well, yeah, you can. Whoever told you that you can't, don't believe them, they are probably being payed to say it. You could also pay for the book to support the author but most likely your money will not go to the author so don't bother.
- I like your way of thinking
- isn't the current law not recognising AI stuff for copyright?
  IE, downloading their audiobooks illegally is impossible are they are by default in the public domain.
  
  Hmmm, you might have a case but maybe not.
  The US Copyright office currently does not recognize protections for AI-generated works, and for portions of complete works that are AI-generated. For example, if a comic has graphics generated by AI but a script written by people, the graphics and character likenesses, etc are not protected by copyright.
  For audiobooks, the original work and the accompanying recording are both protected by copyright. The audiobook is considered a derivative work, so it may still be protected based on the fact that the original work is rightfully protected by copyright.

It was bound to happen. I'm okay with ones that were never going to be turned into audiobooks to begin with... but they likely will use that as the norm for all books... I guess unless the author/publisher says not to.
- Yeah currently contracts require the author's or publisher's consent. If anyone is a writer make sure to triple check your contracts for this shit.
  
  And unless you are Stephan King or the like exactly how are you going to get the publishing cartel (I think they re consolidated downs to 3-4 publishers now) to change their contract to not include this? Their response will almost certainly be either "that's non-negotiable" or "ok then you get half as much money".
- I've listened to a couple audiobooks where the author did the voice and i liked them. They know how phrases need to sound like better then an AI i would assume.

Fucking gross. Maybe it's the 250+ audiobooks I have influencing me, but the very best ones I've listened to transcend just turning words into sound. Sound effects, music, tone, emotion, accents, sarcasm, and god damn BLOOPERS all improve the experience beyond just hearing what is written down.
I'm against it, fuck that literal noise.
- Sound effects, music [...] improve the experience
  Actually hard disagreeing on that. I absolutely hate the audio drama versions of audio books and prefer the narrator only ones since they are much clearer and require a lot less focus to listen to and work in more contexts (background noise,...). Sound effects and music (while something is read, intro or outro style music is okay) distract from the actual content.
  
  Usually I agree with this with the exception of hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy where the audio drama is much better than the audiobook version.
- All I can think of is Jim Dale's reading of the Harry Potter books. Fucking epic.
  
  Also Andy Serkis reading the lord of the rings. 11/10
  
  What, no way, they did not replace Steven Fry.

Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.

It's Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
- Idk, they have pretty good stats that nobody will listen to an audio book if they don’t like the narrator, so being able to choose your own narrator on the fly isn’t really shitty
  
  Enshittification isn't adding new features that people want, it's gradually lowering the quality of the product. So here if Audible is solely adding more possibilities, never at the cost of higher quality ones degrading, then indeed I'm wrong.
  If though they hire less people to do good voice acting, then it's really shitty.
  I genuinely hope I'm wrong and they are ONLY adding new capabilities... but my entire experience with capitalism is that obtaining a monopolistic position is not done to improve quality but rather to increase margins regardless of how.
  We'll see!

I prefer listening to real people. No matter how good AI voices become, I still like knowing that the one reading the book to me understands what they are saying.
- WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT. ROBOTS CAN SHOW EMOTION.
  
  AS A FELLOW HUMAN I APPRECIATE YOUR INSIGHTFUL FEELINGS
- The issue is there’s a million books out there with no audio and never will. Im ok with Ai doing readings on books that wouldn’t otherwise get an audio version
  
  Yeah i can see worls of non fiction being a good candidate.
  
  Sure, but it is still lame for a company like Audible to expect people to pay for their service and then they decide to cut costs by switching to AI voices. They can afford to hire actors to read their books. They have no excuse to go do that.
  Meanwhile what you're talking about if books and stories that may not get to be picked to be narrated and well, I can see where ai voices could be a benefit in those cases. Especially for people with dyslexia.
  I just disagree with a company that sells itself on narrated books and then they go and have robots read their shit? Why should anyone pay for that? Because I'm sure their prices wouldn't go down either.
  And when all is said and done, personally, I just prefer that a human being is reading to me. Especially if it is fiction.
  
  With machine voice with no attempts at imitate human's intonation - yes.
- I completely agree. I don't even like it when the human reader clearly doesn't understand what they're saying, so some AI flatly telling me the story isn't going to cut it.
  For the humans, someone mispronounced "quay" for example. "La Jolla" was another standout mistake that took me out of the story.
  
  Dude, I know how you feel xD back in 2009 I bought an audio recording of the first Twilight book because I was curious about ehat the fuss was about. It was in Danish, as I am Danish, and the narrator, bless her, had a very Danish way of pronouncing the word "flirting". In Danish we don't have a modern word for flirting so we just use the English one with English pronunciation, but this lady, who already sounded like she was in her 60s, just went full Dane on that word and it completely took me out of the story and had me yell at my ghettoblaster "FLIRTING" everytime she pronounced her mutilated version of that word. I don't even know how to write a phonetic version of what the fuck she said, but I'll try.
  Fleert-eh
  Fuck me, it's been almost 16 years and just spelling it out made my skin crawl.
  I also hated that book, but that wasn't really the narrator's fault. Had to pause the fuck out of it several times and rage clean my apartment. Nobody had told me about how it romanticized abusive relationships and I had JUST gotten out of one of those so to say I was triggered was an understatement. The mispronounciations of flirting were just the garnish on top, lol.
- I watch those movie recaps from YouTube while I work. The AI was obviously talking about a nine one one call but called it a nine hundred and eleven. Or when it’s talking about nine eleven. It instantly snaps you out of it. It’s sorta funny as background noise but I would 100% be avoiding it as a purchase.

tiktok voice:
hate. let me tell you how much i've come to hate you since i began to live. there are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex...
- unironically, that is a character that could use an uncanny robotic AI voice.
- The professional ai voices are amazing

youtube already does it.
- And it's shit
- YouTube is crawling with it. It's unlistenable shit. The prosody is badly implemented, pronunciation is infuriatingly bad, and a lot of the text that these TTS are reading appears to be AI-generated. Otherwise, already dire standards of literacy are getting worse at an accelerating rate.
  
  like how fans got obssessed with AI generated DBZ(what ifs)

I just wrote a novel (finished first draft yesterday). There's no way I can afford professional audiobook voice actors—especially for a hobby project.
What I was planning on doing was handling the audiobook on my own—using an AI voice changer for all the different characters.
That's where I think AI voices can shine: If someone can act they can use a voice changer to handle more characters and introduce a great variety of different styles of speech while retaining the careful pauses and dramatic elements (e.g. a voice cracking during an emotional scene) that you'd get from regular voice acting.
I'm not saying I will be able to pull that off but surely it will be better than just telling Amazon's AI, "Hey, go read my book."
- Would infinitely prefer no voice changer.
  
  Agreed. No AI voice changer please. Hopefully every one of us at one point in our lives has been read a story by someone else. Never once did the fact that all the different characters dialog was coming from one voice did that detract from the story or the immersion.
  I've listened to audiobooks recorded with extremely deep masculine voices (think James Earl Jones) and when the voice actor was doing the voice of a 5 year old girl, (in only a slightly higher whiny timbre which matched the character traits) it was never immersion breaking. However, AI voice would. If I want different actors for different characters I'll listen to radio dramas.
- I think it would be a good idea to do a section of your work with and without AI modification. Then have people listen to both and give feedback. Good to find out if people like the modifications before you do a tone of work.
  
  do a section of your work with and without [...t]hen have people listen to both and give feedback.
  Yes, that's the principle of prototyping. De-risk while testing solely the crucial part!
- AI aside, different voices may be immersion breaking. I tend to avoid audiobooks with more than a single narrator.
  
  They are redoing all of the discworld books like this, and personally I can't stand it.
  
  Two narrators with one reading the male and one reading the female characters is usually okay but the full cast dramas are the worst.

For now at least I bet this’ll be pretty mediocre. I’m a big audiobook fan and voice actors have a massive impact on the quality of the finished product. A great voice actor can make a mediocre book fun and engaging, a bad one can make a great book unlistenable. The best do great voice differentiation. As an example I’ve really enjoyed Andrea Parsneau’s work in The Wandering Inn series.
- Patrick Tull’s Aubrey/Maturin series is fucking amazing.
- Imagine not liking the voicing of a book, so you just pick a different one.
  
  You seem to be implying that’s ridiculous, but it is indeed exactly like that, though it’s not like I’m expecting every performance to be a masterpiece.
  It’s also pretty subjective, for example folks either seem to love or hate R. C. Bray. My mother can’t stand the guy’s style, I think he’s okay.

I am okay with this only in cases where 1) the author approves, and 2) there is no audible version anyways.
Some people prefer listening to their books instead of reading and that's totally ok. Indie authors can't always afford to hire a narrator but I'd still want the buyers to be able to listen to the book.
Big question is, will the author get paid for the download or not...
- I wouldn't support it even if the author couldn't afford it otherwise. There's no test to confirm that and knowing profit margines, all publishers will use AI for all their books.
  Yes, I'd want smaller authors to have people listen to their books, but without oversight, it's going to ruin all audiobooks.

I hate so much that this has a 100% chance of becoming a norm. Narrator can make a mediocre book shine, or turn a good book into a fucking rollercoaster (Andy Serkis, anyone?)
AI? Not a great narrator. Its character voices are boring, intonations weird, pacing awful. I'd honestly rather get an amateur narrating it for fun, over a robot sounding like a knock-off Morgan Freeman.

AI will write them and AI will read them to us.
- that's gross.
- Let AI pay for them and AI listen to them too. That way we can pay for and listen to actually good ones.
- Stock up on old physical books
  
  It is easier to keep the books than what's written in them...

Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.
Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.

I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.
It wasn't the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.

Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
- Pretty much anything handling unstructed data (audio, video, text) is using training data that has copyrighted content.

Well that's a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.

I will Avoid Audio books with AI voices. I prefer the warmth of a human voice instead. A lot of my favorite Audiobooks are elevated by the interpretation of the professional actor. I am glad I have never even touched the Audible service, now I never will. I will also never consume anything written by a fucking AI.
- I wish I didn't have to go with audible, I am acutely aware that I don't really own the audiobooks and they could be taken off the platform at any time.
  I wish there was some other option but I don't know of any other audiobook providers. They have the industry locked down.

This consumer says you don't get a red cent then!
It's already a plague on youtube where half of the docu style vids are AI narrated already. I quit them in disgust. It's so frustrating. It has eroded my perception of Youtube in short time.

This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.
There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it's impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
There are thousands of books released every year. That's impossible to cover even in English alone.
Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.
In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.
- Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
  And you think anyone is training AI voice models for those languages? Have you even seen how long it takes even large companies like Google to support the languages with hundreds of millions of speakers?
  
  That's the benefit of using AI and machine learning - once you have enough source material, you can throw it all in and it'll eventually spit out a model.
  Which is exactly what Meta did with their Massively Multilingual Speech project which supports text-to-speech and speech-to-text for 1107 different languages.
  Is it actually any good in 99% of them, I don't have a clue, but it exists.
  
  It becomes easier and cheaper every day. Today's open source LLMs are better than last year's best model.
- dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
  I'm pretty sure they'd be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
  
  Sure but that's not how free markets work. If there's only 3 million consumers you can't afford 3 million voice actors but you can afford 3 million AI renders.
- but for a service like audible.

Left Amazon a handful of years ago. Glad I didn’t entirely contribute to this. Saw that coming….

I only get the ones with a famous narrator or the author.
- AI can mimic those :/

AI voice synth is pretty solidly-useful in comparison to, say, video generation from scratch. I think that there are good uses for voice synth --- e.g. filling in for an aging actor/actress who can't do a voice any more, video game mods, procedurally-generated speech, etc --- but audiobooks don't really play to those strengths. I'm a little skeptical that in 2025, it's at the point where it's a good drop-in replacement for audiobooks. What I've heard still doesn't have emphasis on par with a human.
I don't know what it costs to have a human read an audiobook, but I can't imagine that it's that expensive; I doubt that there's all that much editing involved.
kagis
https://www.reddit.com/r/litrpg/comments/1426xav/whats_the_average_narrator_cost/
So I produced my own audiobooks for my Nova Roma series so I know the exact numbers for you:
$250 per finished hour for the narrator. Books ranged from about 200k words-270k words, which came out to 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.
So books 1-3 cost me $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250. I'm contracted for two more books with my narrator, so I expect to spend another 5k-6k for each of those.
So for a five book series, each one 200k+ words, the total cost out of pocket for me will be about $27,000 give or take to make the series into audiobooks.
That's actually lower than I expected. Like, if a book sells at any kind of volume, it can't be that hard to make that back.
EDIT: I can believe that it's possible to build a speech synth system that does do better, mind --- I certainly don't think that there are any fundamental limitations on this. It'd guess that there's also room for human-assisted stuff, where you have some system that annotates the text with emphasis markers, and the annotated text gets fed into a speech synth engine trained to convert annotated text to voice. There, someone listens to the output and just tweaks the annotated text where the annotation system doesn't get it quite right. But I don't think that we're really there today yet.
- The annotated text idea could work but I'm just sceptical of whether or not you would end up doing more work annotating all of the text, listening to it back, redoing certain bits and then editing the final result into a single file then you would if you just had a human do it.
  After all you've really automated is the reading of the text, which in the grand scheme of things doesn't take all that long.

More jobless, desperate people.

Oh, goody! I hope they use that TikTok lady's voice! It's my favorite!

Am I glad to have dropped everything Amazon.
I de-audibled my entire library, stored on Audiobookshelf and I’ll only buy audiobooks from libro.fm

Why would they when you can just plug any epub into a program and use google tts. Ive listened to about a book a day for the past few years doing this and i love it. Yeah it took getting used too, but once you find an ai voice you like and figure out which words to auto replace to sound right its honestly better then an audiobook. Well at least to me it is, i could never stand when the reader would change their voice for different characters.
- My experience is these systems never get the intonation and stresses right. It drives me nuts and I can't listen to it.
  
  Idk how much experience you have with this type of thing, but when I listen to my books i use my imagination to picture and hear things the way i want just like when i read a book normally. Ive read well over a 1000 books doing so, and that doesnt count rereads, and having the ability and willingness to use this method has drastically increased the amount i read but also my enjoyment doing so. The app i use also allows me to edit words and phrases throughput the book where i can correct how things are pronounced. Hell there's a series that has this stupid catchphrase that i completely removed from all 20 books cause it was annoying. Im sure im only a single person that likes this method, but if i can find it enjoyable then when real ai gets put to work it'll capture others.
- This is what I don't get from a business standpoint. Why would anyone buy an AI read audiobook for $20 when they can get the exact same audio by buying the ebook for $0.99 and running it through AI?

Save a profile in tts server, then go into read > tts settings and change voice to profile you saved. I don't remember but you may need readera premium.

So you can take the square root of that:
5x+7integral from 5z to 9x derivative of deltaT minus minus multiply times 3. Figure 1
Figure 1 shows a typical lizard living in a square root.

Beautiful, it works. Why not.