It became known that audio books appeared on the Apple Books service, voiced using a special algorithm based on artificial intelligence. Because of this, of course, the company plans not only to reduce the cost of the work of announcers and storytellers, but also to significantly speed up the process of creating audio books.
Image Credit: Samuel Axon / ArsTechnica
At the moment there are only a few books voiced by a neural network in the Apple library, but there could be even more in the future. Each of these books in the description has a corresponding mark stating that the work is voiced by a “digital voice”. It is noted that the audiobooks voiced by the neural network are not much inferior to the more famous ones, in which people were engaged in voice acting. However, at some points in the narration you may notice passages with odd pronunciation or a lack of emotion in the voice.
According to the source, Apple has been in contact with various independent book publishers over the past few months, offering to cover the cost of creating audiobooks and promising to pay authors royalties on sales. Not all publishers have agreed to work with Apple, but it’s likely that the IT giant will continue to expand the library of audiobooks on its platform in the future as they are very popular. We also note that Apple will most likely not be the only company using a neural network to create audiobooks. In the past, Google and Amazon, both major e-book and audiobook providers, have not ruled out the possibility either.
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