AI-Narrated Audiobooks Now Available in Apple Books

[MacRumors]

Apple has now launched Apple Books digital narration, offering a new way for publishers to automatically generate high-quality AI-narrated audio from written text.

The feature, first announced in December via the Apple Books for Authors webpage, allows publishers on the Apple Books platform to opt-in to have their written books converted into a narrated audio form using AI. Samples of the voices developed specifically for the feature are available on the same webpage.

More and more book lovers are listening to audiobooks, yet only a fraction of books are converted to audio — leaving millions of titles unheard. Many authors — especially independent authors and those associated with small publishers — aren't able to create audiobooks due to the cost and complexity of production. Apple Books digital narration makes the creation of audiobooks more accessible to all, helping you meet the growing demand by making more books available for listeners to enjoy.

Apple Books digital narration brings together advanced speech synthesis technology with important work by teams of linguists, quality control specialists, and audio engineers to produce high-quality audiobooks from an ebook file. Apple has long been on the forefront of innovative speech technology, and has now adapted it for long-form reading, working alongside publishers, authors, and narrators.

[...]

Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks, and will help bring audio to as many books and as many people as possible. Apple Books remains committed to celebrating and showcasing the magic of human narration and will continue to grow the human-narrated audiobook catalog.

Apple is offering different AI voices for different genres and the feature is only available for some genres at this time, but more will be added in the future. Apple says that it can take up to one month for an AI-narrated audiobook to be created and approved, suggesting that there is an element of manual review in the process. Publishers are also free to offer a traditional, human-narrated audiobook alongside the AI-narrated version.

As highlighted by The Guardian, the first AI-narrated audiobooks are now available in Apple Books, highlighted by the tag "Narrated by Apple Books."

Article Link: AI-Narrated Audiobooks Now Available in Apple Books

 

[danbalsh]

Wow, those AI samples are incredible!

 

[philcourage]

Here's to unsubscribing from Audible!

 

[kalsta]

Just listened to a few samples. They sound more-or-less real, but impassive.

Wake me when they offer some non-American accents.

 

[VampyricGentleman]

Whilst I have no interest in it, because I have a huge Kindle Library, I prefer my audio books narrated by a human, purely because I often wonder what the narrator when not the author really thinks of the book they are reading.

 

[till]

high-quality

It's better than simple TTS, but the robot leaks through a lot. It's extremely low-quality compared to any decent human narrator, but I suppose it's better than nothing. I can't imagine anyone paying actual money for this though.

 

[Corsig]

I was expecting a much more robot sounding voice. Very surprised by how far they’ve come. If you didn’t tell me I would have thought it was human

 

[orbital~debris]

Apple should include an Easter egg in Books – would be neat to have Whisper, Zarvox or Trinoids on hand to read books 😁

 

[Larsvonhier]

Handling of lung air is missing. Breathing in and out.
A couple of iterations back, even the macOS (OSX?) TTS did this while reading longer texts. What happened to this lifelike feature?

 

[foobarbaz]

I listen to a lot of audiobooks, but sometimes the voice actors just don't do it for me. Having multiple AI voices to pick as alternatives would be an interesting development. But I'm curious how well they compare dramatically.

Curious, though: "mysteries and thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy are not currently supported" Apparently the voices are trained by genre, so they must be based on existing audiobooks? I hope the narrators get compensation for that.

 

[Larsvonhier]

Hm. Taking it one step further: Here is a short short story done by OpenAI (that I fed with some sketches) and a commercial AI reading it.
I´d regard it as SF.
Enjoy!

(Cover (c) Lucasfilm Games, ca. 1984)

 

[JUiCEJamie]

Anybody else think that the “Madison” voice is just Anne Hathaway [WeCrashed] in disguise?

 

[foobarbaz]

The samples are very impressive, but certainly carefully picked.
Listening to the longer preview on the iBooks Store, I could definitely make out some robotic and monotonous speech. Still, they're very good, and I'm willing to bet AI narrators will be the industry standard in a few years. (As opposed to fully self-driving cars …)

 

[purplerainpurplerain]

The samples are very impressive, but certainly carefully picked.
Listening to the longer preview on the iBooks Store, I could definitely make out some robotic and monotonous speech. Still, they're very good, and I'm willing to bet AI narrators will be the industry standard in a few years. (As opposed to fully self-driving cars …)

Marketing will always show us the best examples and never when it freezes, stutters, crashes and pronounces words wrong. It’s like when Microsoft first presented Cortana and then when it came out it was nothing like the presentation. It is still **** now after 7 years.

There was also this company shows they can use AI to create life like digital humans and it only took one week for the truth to come out. They used people for their presentation. Then they made an excuse ‘oh you see we had to use people as an example of what our goal is’.

Anyone remember 5 years ago when Adobe showed “full Photoshop” on iPad Pro? It’s nothing like a full Photoshop today.

Companies should be fined for this kind of Theranos BS.

 

[purplerainpurplerain]

Just listened to a few samples. They sound more-or-less real, but impassive.

Wake me when they offer some non-American accents.

Also they’re a bit slow and the pauses between sentences sound too halting. There will probably be turtle-rabbit speed controller.

 

[Muzzakus]

It’s only the beginning

 

[mike5000]

These are fantastic. I often don't care for the human voice chosen for audiobooks but these AI voices are all fantastic. Interestingly, I hear the first voice as a white woman, the second voice as a younger black male, the third as an older black woman and the fourth as a jewish man.

 

[Bentham]

Accessibility always at the foreground!

 

[purplerainpurplerain]

These are fantastic. I often don't care for the human voice chosen for audiobooks but these AI voices are all fantastic. Interestingly, I hear the first voice as a white woman, the second voice as a younger black male, the third as an older black woman and the fourth as a jewish man.

Confirmation that Sacha Baron Cohen recorded these.

 

[Starfia]

Not bad within the still-evolving realm of tuned text-to-speech, and an advance for people who have trouble reading text who have no other option.

But if you think of an audiobook as a genuinely interpreted and performed book…

… I mean, would you exclusively favour TV shows, movies or even stage plays with AI actors?

Apple runs their own TV content business now, so we know their answer to that.

 

[Gudi]

Apple has now launched Apple Books digital narration, offering a new way for publishers to automatically generate high-quality AI-narrated audio from written text.

Not good enough. I'm waiting for a feature that reads me any ebook.

Apple says that it can take up to one month for an AI-narrated audiobook to be created and approved, suggesting that there is an element of manual review in the process.

If I have to wait one month anyway, they could as well hire a real human for the job!

 

[JMStearnsX2]

Handling of lung air is missing. Breathing in and out.
A couple of iterations back, even the macOS (OSX?) TTS did this while reading longer texts. What happened to this lifelike feature?

Skeuomorphism is out of style.

 

[JMStearnsX2]

Those samples sounds pretty good actually, I think the male voices sound a bit more realistic. I'll have to see whether I would listen to a full book like that or not.

 

[A_Hunger_Artist]

Man does anyone else remember when Amazon tried this when they first launched the Kindle? It was a ********* of epic proportions and they backpedalled immediately. Guess Apple is big enough that they get to call the shots now.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I listen to a lot of audiobooks, but sometimes the voice actors just don't do it for me. Having multiple AI voices to pick as alternatives would be an interesting development. But I'm curious how well they compare dramatically.

Curious, though: "mysteries and thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy are not currently supported" Apparently the voices are trained by genre, so they must be based on existing audiobooks? I hope the narrators get compensation for that.

I’d be up for an AI powered Radio-Play, especially if they can factor in Spatial Audio. The HHGTTG Radio series is what I’m thinking about.

I’m guessing some of the words in fantasy and science fiction would give the current system fits! And for mysteries and thrillers, they’d have to tune it for long strings of open ended questions and perhaps some whispering.