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Select Apple Books can have a fully digital narrator.
One of the appeals to the steadily-growing audiobook industry is having a pleasantly-voiced person reading out your favorite books to you, even more so if the person in question is a famous person. However, in an effort to cut costs and pocket the difference, some companies have been looking for aspects to prune in the audiobook scene. One rather unexpected facet that could get axed is the narrators themselves.
Apple has revealed a new AI-generated narrator voice to read out the passages of books present on its Apple Books service. Not all books will support this feature, and authors can choose whether to opt in or not, but for those that do, they can have a completely computer-generated voice read out the book to anyone who listens.
“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 Books 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,” Apple said on its website.
Apple's new audiobook narration service uses AI voices https://t.co/13iL1aPr3g
— Engadget (@engadget) January 5, 2023
Apple is encouraging any interested independent authors to submit their works for the process through partnered publishing companies Draft2Digital and Ingram CoreSource. Apple is accepting submissions for romance and general fiction books, with more genres to come.
