Audiobooks are delivered to AI: “In less than a decade, almost all voices will be synthetic”

Everything sounds natural. The diction is good, the words intertwine at the proper pace and form fluid phrases, with the pauses that one would make when reading a text. The intonation and the speed of speech also seem human. But they are not: we are listening to an audiobook narrated by a synthetic voice. No one has sat in a studio to record it, and that worries professional narrators, who are already seeing their income fall. The industry, on t…