Today’s Tuesday timely tip for authors. I was visiting the Publishers Weekly website and came across this article about Google play books and AI audio narration.
I was intrigued because I had already been exposed to this concept, listening to the creative penn podcast. And if you don’t know, AI narration has changed and maybe you’ve already been listening to it without knowing it.
Now, AI audio narration will never replace well, I would say it’s unlikely to completely replace talented voice actors because an individual word spoken by a live person may have a different inflection than just being able to generate that word.
However, with the improvements in AI narration, this will open up the opportunity for people to have books in languages all over the world, where now it might be cost prohibitive.
And especially for nonfiction books. This is important. Think about the voice you hear in your head and the voice you might hear on an audio book version.
And if that narrator is from a country or has an inflection or an accent that doesn’t quite fit for you, if you could choose what voice you wanted, that might make a big difference in your audiobook experience.
Use AI narration Courtesy of Google to Get Started
Using the Google AI narration option, will give many authors the ability to create an audio book quickly. This service is free (at this time, mid-2022). You’ll be able to take your audio file and sell it not only in the Google Play space, but other places too.
So take a look at what Google books is offering for AI narration. Audio books are growing in popularity.
Where People Listen to Audiobooks
People like me, I like to listen as I’m out on my walks and more and more people are doing that. And just so that you know, if someone buys an audio version of your book, if they love that book, they’ll buy it in other formats because they want to refer to it again and again.
So Judy Baker, with a timely tip for authors on Tuesday, you can find me at https://bookmarketingmentor.com.
Here are links for exploring text to speech and auto-narration on Google:
https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech
https://play.google.com/books/publish/autonarrated/