The Apple Books app has been updated with a series of artificial intelligence audiobooks.
Apple surprised the world with the launch of a series of audiobooks with digital narration in your Books app (Apple Books).
Normally, the bookstore has always offered multiple selections of audiobooks whose vibrant and captivating stories have been told by human beings, usually voice actors and actresses…
But not this time. This time, Apple decided that the narration of its audiobooks was done by artificial intelligence. But the sound isn’t as robotic as you might expect, plus they’re even relaxing!
Meet Madison, Jackson, Helena and Mitchell, Apple’s New Digital AI Voices
Apple’s digital voices were created and optimized for specific literary genres, according to the company on its book authors blog. There are voices for romance audiobooks, voices for sci-fi audiobooks, and so on.
AI digital storytelling voice
After the boom of Audible and other audiobook platforms, more and more people are encouraged to listen to this type of auditory literature, but only a small fraction of books published worldwide become audiobooks. That’s why Apple took the initiative to speed up the process with digital voices.
Will the magic of reading a good book eventually be lost? What about voice actors and actresses? Well, from Apple they wanted to anticipate that they would continue to work on audiobooks with human narrators.
“Apple Books is committed to celebrating and showcasing the magic of human storytelling and will continue to grow its catalog of human-told audiobooks.”
The company with the bitten apple logo offers some small audio extracts of its new digital voices on its official site.
For now, there are only 4 different voices belonging to several AI sound tones dubbed Madison, Jackson, Helena and Mitchell. Click on each of their names to listen to a small sample of each audiobook in Books for free. They don’t sound bad at all, we recommend listening to each of them a bit.
“Our non-fiction storytelling self-development program is being launched and will be more widely available in the future.”
Audiobooks with AI narration appear in the Books app store with a small text under the title indicating that the narration is done “by Apple Books”. What do you think of this curious initiative from Apple?
