Apple makes a big shift from the current audiobook model to AI narrated books

The popularity of the audiobook market has exploded in recent years with technology companies scrambling to gain a hold. The tech giant, Apple, makes a big shift from the current audiobook model to books narrated by artificial intelligence. This new Apple Audiobook helps to generate high-quality AI-narrated audio from written text.

The new audiobook feature represents a big shift from the current audiobook model, which involves authors narrating their books in a process that can take weeks and cost thousands for a publisher. Digital narration is less costly. The launch of this new feature was announced at the end of last year and is now available to download in the Apple Books app, AI narrated audiobooks are tagged with a 'Narrated by Apple Books' subtitle. Initially, Apple is only targeting specific genres like Fiction and Romance. Each genre is accompanied by a particular AI voice.

Apple describes the new "digital narration" feature on its website as making "the creation of audiobooks more accessible to all," by reducing "the cost and complexity" of producing them for authors and publishers. The latest feature is only available for some genres at this time, but more will be added in the future. The genres available are Romance and Fiction narrated by 'Madison' and 'Jackson'. The Non-fiction genre which is going to be storyteller will be narrated by 'Helena' and 'Mitchell'. Apple says that it can take up to one month for an AI-narrated audiobook to be created and approved, suggesting that there is an element of manual review in the process. "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 says. "Apple 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." The service is only available in English and the primary categories are Romance and Fiction. There are both free and paid audiobooks available. The AI voices are as good as the users would expect and easily understandable, but it lacks the warmth of a human storyteller.

On the Apple Books Store app, searching for 'AI narration', a list of works included in the scheme would appear which are given a tag as 'narrated by digital voice based on human narrator'. According to The Guardian, Apple was due to launch the new feature in mid-November but got delayed because of the layoffs at Meta and chaos surrounding Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. The generation of an audiobook is not an automatic one-button press affair. Apple says that it takes a month for a submitted book to be made available in the synthesized form. In the early stages, Apple has been manually reviewing the AI-generated tracks for quality assurance before publishing. Also, the author must own the rights to produce an audiobook version, and now the sourcebook must be written in the English language. AI narration is a particularly appealing proposition to small independent writers, who do not have the capital to pay for human talent and the associated recording process required for classical human book narration. In recent months, Apple approached independent publishers and partners including some in the Canadian market, but not all agreed to participate. Apple's development of AI-narrated books represents a shift in how major technology sees the future of audiobooks.

"The narrator brings a whole new range of art in creating audiobooks, and we believe that's a powerful thing. They're creating something different from print books, but that adds value as an art form," said David Caron, a co-producer at Canada's largest audiobook publisher.

Before the launch of the new feature, the company faced criticism questioning the value from both a literary or customer perspective. Producing an audiobook with a human voice can take weeks and is expensive, AI-narrated audiobooks are more convincing. Apple has sold audiobooks through its Books app for years, and the company was rumored to be interested in developing its audiobook service and shifting from a reseller to a producer. Apple collects a 30% fee on all services and product sales through its app store. Recently, the company pulled in $78.13 billion from its high-margin services business, which includes sales from apps, as well as its music, gaming, and streaming services.