The next time you buy an audiobook from Apple, you may find that it comes not with human narration, but with a digital one. Under Apple’s new initiative to expand the number of audiobooks and extend greater support to indie authors and small publishers, the tech titan is bringing AI-powered digital narration to select titles on Apple books.
This feature is not exactly new – it was supposed to be launched by Apple back in November, but it delayed the release due to mass layoffs at Meta and the chaos that ensued at Twitter ever since Elon Musk completed the acquisition of the social media company.
The text-to-speech AI is now charged with narrating audiobooks, as Apple aims to help those who find it difficult to convert their titles to audiobooks because of “the cost and complexity of production” involved in the process. On its website for authors, the company revealed that the digital narration of audiobooks makes them more available to all, helping to meet “the growing demand by making more books available for listeners to enjoy.”
According to Apple, the digital narration technology integrated 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.” The ebooks that come with support for AI-powered audio narration include a note that informs that they are “Narrated by Apple Books.”
“Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks and will help bring audio to as many books and as many people as possible. Apple Books remains committed to celebrating and showcasing the magic of human narration and will continue to grow the human-narrated audiobook catalog,” Apple said on its website for authors.
For those interested to get their books narrated by Apple’s AI voices, they need to sign up with partner publishing companies – Draft2Digital or Ingram CoreSource – before selecting the title. For now, Apple is limiting submissions to the romance and fiction genres and includes support for literary, historical, and women’s fiction. Currently, Apple offers a limited number of digital voices to choose from – under soprano and baritone categories.
The books must adhere to the criteria set by Apple, be in English and already available on Apple Books, and the author must own the rights to produce the audiobook. It can take up to one month for an AI-narrated audiobook to be created and approved.
