40,000 AI-Narrated Audiobooks Flood Audible

A new breed of audiobook is taking over digital bookshelves -- ones narrated not by professional voice actors, but by artificial intelligence voices. It's an AI audiobook revolution that has been turbo-charged by Amazon. From a report: Since announcing a beta tool last year allowing self-published authors to generate AI 'virtual voice' narrations for their ebooks, over 40,000 AI-narrated titles have flooded onto Audible, Amazon's audiobook platform. The eye-popping stat, revealed in a recent Bloomberg report, has many authors celebrating but is also raising red flags for human narrators.

For indie writers wanting to crack the lucrative audiobook market without paying hefty professional voiceover fees, Amazon's free virtual narration tool is a game-changer. One blogger cited in the report claimed converting an ebook to audio using the AI narration took just 52 minutes, bypassing the expensive studio recording route. Others have mixed reactions. Last month, an author named George Steffanos launched an audiobook version of his existing book, posting that while he prefers human-generated works to those generated by AI, 'the modest sales of my work were never going to support paying anyone for all those hours of narration.'

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