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Audible, one of the world’s largest audiobook platforms, is opening the floodgates to AI slop.
On Tuesday, the Amazon-owned service announced its new “integrated AI narration technology” that’ll allow selected publishers to rapidly churn out audiobooks using a wide range of AI-generated voices.
It’s Audible’s biggest foray into AI yet, and will be a major blow for voice actors, who are fighting tooth and nail to win protections against the technology, particularly in the US video games industry, where they are still on strike.
“The use of AI to replace human creativity is in itself a dangerous path,” Stephen Briggs, a voice over artist known for narrating the works of Terry Pratchett, told The Guardian.
In the announcement, Audible boasted that book publishers can choose from more than 100 AI-generated voices in English, Spanish, French, and Italian, with multiple accents and dialect options. And as an added incentive, it’s offering better royalty rates to authors who use Audible’s AI to create an audiobook exclusively for the platform, Bloomberg reported.
Audible also plans to roll out a beta version of an AI translation feature later in 2025, offering to either have a human narrator read a translated manuscript or use AI to translate an existing audiobook narrator’s performance into another language.
Audible says it’s working on support for translations from English to Spanish, French, Italian, and German, and publishers, should they choose to, can review the translations through a professional linguist hired by Audible.
“Audible believes that AI represents a momentous opportunity to expand the availability of audiobooks with the vision of offering customers every book in every language, alongside our continued investments in premium original content,” CEO Bob Carrigan said in a statement, “ensuring listeners worldwide can access extraordinary books that might otherwise never reach their ears.”
It’s a shocking announcement, but the writing has been on the wall for a while now. Last September, Amazon started a trial program allowing audiobook narrators to generate AI clones of their voice. And in 2023, Amazon launched an AI-generated “virtual voice” feature that could transform self-published author’s titles into audiobooks. Today, more than 60,000 of these titles are narrated with Audible’s virtual voice, according to Bloomberg.
Audible argues that by using AI, it’s expanding its audience and breaking down language barriers. But audiobook narrators, authors, and translators aren’t buying that the company has wholly good intentions. As always, it’ll be human creatives that’ll be getting the short end of the stick — all in service of creating an inferior product.
“No one pretends to use AI for translation, audiobooks, or even writing books because they are better; the only excuse is that they are cheaper,” Frank Wynne, a renowned translator of French and Spanish literature into English, told The Guardian. “Which is only true if you ignore the vast processing power even the simplest AI request requires. In the search for a cheap simulacra to an actual human, we are prepared to burn down the planet and call it progress.”
“The art — and it is an art — of a good audiobook is the crack in the voice at a moment of unexpected emotion, the wryness of good comedy timing, or the disbelief a listener feels when one person can convincingly be a whole cast of characters,” Kristein Atherton, who’s narrated over four hundred audiobooks on Audible, told the newspaper. “No matter how ‘human’ an AI voice sounds, it’s those little intricacies that turn a good book into an excellent one. AI can’t replicate that.”
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