Apple gave a surprise with the latest batch of audiobooks it released in its book catalog: the voice that narrates these books is not that of a human if not that of an artificial intelligence. Right now, that’s happening with English books, as the Guardian tells.
Officially, Apple talks about “digital voices based on a human narrator” and wanted to launch them sooner, although what happened with Elon Musk and the layoffs at Meta delayed that until today. But regardless of their qualification, dispensing with human voices can cause some controversy.
A promising market and attractive cost reduction
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At the level of the business model, the structure does not change much: the details of the source that the authors of the original books will continue to charge royalty fee and Apple is the one who bears the costs of generating the voices thanks to artificial intelligence. Costs that we assume will be less than what it would mean to hire a human narrator. At least in the long term.
It remains to be seen whether this switch to artificial voices to tell books will be noticed by the public. According to some estimates, the audiobook market is expected to reach $35 billion by 2030. So the reaction should be felt.
An Applesphere
My e-book reader? An iPad and this mode of concentration
And of course, if that first batch of AI-narrated audiobooks are successful, we should soon see the same with Spanish-narrated audiobooks. Would you listen to an audiobook narrated by an artificially generated voice if it did so convincingly? The debate is served.
Picture | Aaron Burden
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The new
Apple’s latest audiobooks aren’t narrated by people: AI wants to break the mold in another industry
was originally posted on
Appleswill
by Miguel Lopez.
