Amazon’s Audible has unveiled a fresh strategy to increase its audiobook offerings by collaborating with publishers to transform physical and digital books into audio versions narrated by artificial intelligence. This move is aimed at quickly scaling its library and keeping pace with competitors like Apple and Spotify as demand surges across the industry.
By harnessing Amazon’s advanced AI, publishers are now able to pick from a selection of more than 100 digital voices in English, French, Spanish, and Italian, each with distinctive regional accents. Audible is planning to further enhance its pool of voices in the near future to give publishers even more choice.
AI Tools Expand Audiobook Production
Later this year, Audible will launch a beta feature that performs AI-driven translation both in text and speech, supporting key languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Publishers can take advantage of professional linguists to fine-tune these translations, ensuring the final product maintains a high standard of accuracy.
This initiative builds on a previous invite-only pilot from 2023, where independent authors in the United States gained the ability to use Amazon’s synthetic voice software for their e-books. AI-narrated audiobooks have even worked with select narrators to create AI voice models, which has helped the company label a growing number of audiobooks as “Narrated By: Virtual Voice,” now visible across tens of thousands of titles.
Many authors are adopting these tools to make audio versions without the high costs associated with traditional recording studios. However, this rapid shift to AI-generated narration has sparked debate within the industry, with some questioning whether the technology may impact the listening experience.
In parallel, Spotify, Audible’s primary competitor in the audiobook space, has also embraced AI-powered voice technology, recently forming a partnership with the AI company ElevenLabs to bolster their own offerings. Together, these developments signal a major evolution in how audiobooks are produced and accessed.
