AI voices for audiobooks is becoming a strange new trend

One of the joys of being read aloud to is listening to the voice of the person reading. If it’s someone you know and love, the experience is filled with warmth and affection.

And if it’s someone you don’t know — say, a professional actor reading an audiobook — the voice still matters. Narrating an audiobook is a skill, and not an easy one; it takes about three years to master the art, says the Library of Congress.

“A narrator can ruin, make, or even enhance a book,” Katherine A. Powers told me not long ago. Powers has reviewed audiobooks for the Washington Post for nearly 30 years (her column also appears on these pages) and has listened to thousands of audiobooks.

“The best narrators, with a few exceptions, are actors,” she said. “Amateur narrators … tend to have a dead, airless, one might even say ‘robotic,’ way of reading, or sloppy enunciation, or inept pacing, or something else distracting or awful.”

Those automated voices are fine for something short, such as road directions or a newspaper article. But imagine listening for an entire book. Of course you now can, thanks to a development touted by Google and others — artificial intelligence (AI) voices for audiobooks.

Why? Money, of course. And time.

AI narration is inexpensive, allowing self-published writers to cheaply create an audiobook of their novel. The AI voice can record a book in a fraction of the time as an actual human, at a fraction of the cost, which drops the price from more than $10,000 to $2,000 or less, Publishers Weekly reported.

“Based on the little I’ve listened to, AI text-to-voice often misses the right emphases, the right note,” Powers said.