Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour.
The popularity of the audiobook market has exploded in recent years, with technology companies scrambling to gain a foothold. Sales last year jumped 25%, bringing in more than $1.5bn. Industry insiders believe the global market could be worth more than $35bn by 2030.
Before the launch, one Canadian literary agent told the Guardian she did not see the value from both a literary or customer perspective.
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Companies see the audiobooks market and that there’s money to be made. They want to make content. But that’s all it is. It’s not what customers want to listen to. There’s so much value in the narration and the storytelling, said Carly Watters.
Interesting tactic by Apple to attack Amazon’s market dominance in audiobooks through Audible. There is growing discontent against Audible’s terms, so perhaps Apple can convince some authors to move their titles to Apple Books. Then again, this wouldn’t be the first time Apple tried to shake Amazon’s stronghold on book distribution – and utterly failed because of their blatant collusion with book publishers. More recently, Spotify has also been investing in audiobooks as an additional pillar of its streaming service, and immediately clashed with Apple over its App Store commissions.
For the moment, Apple’s AI narration for audiobooks is fairly limited, with only two available digital voices, but a single voice per book. This is far from the more elaborate audiobooks productions, which can feature several voice actors, for each major character and another for the narrator. As technology progresses, AI voice synthesis may start to match human tonality and inflections, at which point it could well produce similarly complex audio-dramas, with many voices and background noises for improved atmosphere.
Text-to-speech engines may soon find other widespread uses, from reading news articles, as someone suggested on Twitter, to perhaps displacing voice actors employed for dubbing in foreign languages. One might even imagine AI tools able to repurpose the voice of the original actor to pronounce the translated text – with proper permission of course – thus improving the immersion and fidelity of the dubbed version. Great future potential, but at the same time a growing threat for the entire profession of voice actors. As in many other situations, software and now AI tools drive markets towards greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and famous, while reducing the livelihoods of smaller, more numerous creators.
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