Past, future merge in AI audiobook

Listen to the AI narrator Mary
in the free sample.

I write about the past in this blog and in my fiction. But I just took a dive into the AI future. My novella, Trust in Love, a story that takes place in 1891-1892, is now available as an audiobook narrated by artificial intelligence.

It seems weird to even write that.

"Mary," the narrator of the book on Google Play, has a pleasant voice. Her diction is good. Better than I expected. She falls short at times on inflection and emotion. And I had to insert a few transitions into the text because Mary couldn't handle a scene break. 

Those are minor points. I'm happy the book is available in audio. It bugged me that my third novel, Growing A Family in Persimmon Hollow, and my novella lacked that option. Especially because the publisher of my first two novels released audio CD versions. I'm the indie publisher of the third novel and novella, and my budget didn't include money for audio. 

Transforming a written work into audio using traditional techniques is very expensive. Narration and production costs are high. AI audiobooks are still new and Google is letting authors try it out. Apple is launching AI audiobooks, too.

I've submitted my novel and novella into the Apple queue. If accepted, Apple will handle production. Google puts the business into the author's hands. It quickly created my AI file and gave it to me for review. I listened to every word of the novella before publishing the audio version. Google then reviewed the finished product.

I'm well aware that AI narration will get better and better and become stiff competition for voice artists. Just as I'm aware that AI writing will get better and better and become stiff competition for authors. 

Will AI get good enough to mimic the emotions a good storyteller needs? Time will tell. For now, I'll take a backward look at what was trending in literature in 1891 and 1892, when AI was the stuff of science fiction. These factoids are courtesy of Wikipedia:

• Strand Magazine is first published in 1891.
• Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Herman Melville, Jules Verne and Oscar Wilde all release new fiction in 1891. Many others do, too, but these are the authors whose names I recognize.
• Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Miller are born in 1891.
• The first collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories from Strand Magazine is published in 1892.
• W.B. Yeats is one of the founders of the Irish Literary Society in 1892.
• Pearl S. Buck, J.R.R. Tolkien and Edna St. Vincent Millay are born in 1892.
• Walt Whitman dies in 1892.

It'd be too dramatic of me to say fiction writing and narration are on their deathbeds. But I suspect living arrangements might be up for negotiation in the not-too-distant future.