Digital reading has been one of the greatest inventions of recent years. Thanks to electronic books or Ebooks, readers can do their reading through a screen by buying or renting books in different stores. Another important step in this area was the arrival of audio books podcast-style narration with intonation and sometimes additional music that allowed users to enjoy a book in another way. However, the cost of creating an audiobook is high. That’s why Apple has launched a tool capable of generating audiobooks using artificial intelligence and the result surprises us all.
AI-narrated audiobooks are coming to Apple Books
As Apple says, more and more audiobooks are listened to these days, but only a small fraction of books are converted to audio, leaving untold millions of pounds. That’s why Apple released Apple Books digital storytelling, a tool that makes audiobook creation much more accessible to everyone.
A large team of sound engineers, quality control specialists and linguists were involved in creating state-of-the-art technology capable of generating audiobooks from text. Each book genre has two different voices available, thus behind each voice hide secrets about intonation, rhythms and speed.
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The tool is now available for all authors who wish to use it. In the case of fiction/romance we have the voices of Madison and Jackson and for non-fiction/personal development we have Helena and Mitchell. You can listen to the voices with a small excerpt on Apple’s official website. For now there is availability of using the tool only for these genres, the rest will have to wait for further updates.
The author will need to have the rights to produce an audiobook version and, for now, the source book must be written in English. However, creating an audiobook version with Apple Books AI does not dispense with making a human version of the audiobook in the future, this is just one more option.
