Listener Opinion Roundup on Digitial Voices
So it’s been about a month since I posted the AI-narrated audiobook of SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND to YouTube. It’s six hours long, and in that time it has accumulated 12,600 watch hours, which means people have listened to it about 2,100 times, give or take.
That’s also enough time for people to have left comments and sent in emails expressing their opinions, and I thought it would be interesting to go through those opinions. We’re in the realm of taste here, so I want to mention that you can’t have a wrong opinion on the topic. Unless your opinion is nonsensical, like digital voices are bad because you shouldn’t put salt on a steak, that kind of thing. (I should mention that there are YouTube commentors for whom achieving even that level of illogical thought is sadly out of reach.)
First, audiobook narrators can take heart. No one actually likes AI voices!
Everyone prefers a human narrator and will listen to one if given the choice. However, in that vein, no one likes going to the doctor, either, but obviously you can have a good experience or a bad experience going to the doctor. Since it is not feasible for every book ever written by the hand of mankind to have a human-narrated audiobook due to the limitations of cost and time, I think people recognize the AI voices as a potential usefully tool to cover some of the gap. To return to the medical metaphor, it’s like blood pressure medication. The ideal would be not to need blood pressure medication at all, just as the ideal would be for every book to have a human narrator, but if you do have high blood pressure, it’s better to have the medication than to go without.
Within the “general dislike” of AI-narrated audiobooks, there were five distinct flavors of opinion, some of which overlapped with one another.
1.) People who liked the story (thanks, everyone!) and found the AI voice an adequate instrument for delivering the story to their ears and brain. I think these are people like long-haul truckers or outdoor workers who can work while wearing headphones, people who listen to a ton of content going about their work and are always looking out for more. They usually check out a lot of audiobooks from their local library service, since buying two or three new audiobooks a week would be prohibitively expensive.
2.) People who liked the story (thanks, everyone!) enough to overcome their intense dislike of the artificial voice. These are people who strongly prefer human narrators, but since that’s not available, might as well listen to the artificial one.
3.) People who hated the AI voice, and I thought I was evil for even trying to experiment with it. They were personally offended that I used an artificial voice, but this opinion was generally a very small minority. Usually it came from fear of displacing human narrators, or of the increasing insidious effect of technology upon human life. As to the first point, SILENT ORDER doesn’t sell well enough to justify an audiobook, so no human narrator would have been screwed out of work because there never would have been a human-narrated version even if AI-voice technology had never come along. As for the second point, whatever effects technology has upon human life, whether positive or negative (or insidious!), will happen regardless of what I decide to do.
4.) Accessibility issues. This is a significant minority of comments. People with vision difficulties, or who have trouble holding a book or ereader for long periods of time, did not mind the artificial voice. In fact, text-to-speech technology has been around for a while, and the AI voice is a significant improvement over earlier versions of the technology. Someone who has been using text-to-speech for years would appreciate the upgrade in the voice.
5.) Finally, you can’t beat free, and the book is free on YouTube. I had emails and comments from a few people who were flat broke (one guy was living in his van) and were glad to have free entertainment of any kind.
One note about ads. I managed to get into the YouTube Partners Program this time around, so I could put ads on the audiobooks. Some people really hated the ads, but 1.) it didn’t cost me anything to make the audiobooks, and 2.) it doesn’t cost anything to listen to them, so I have no problem putting ads on them. My two main sources of revenue for audiobooks are ACX and Findaway Voices, which ACX typically pulling in about five times as much as Findaway on an average month. For July, it looks like YouTube will bring in about 40% more than Findaway Voices, which was a nice surprise. Given how YouTube heavily puts its thumb on the scales for newly uploaded content, I doubt that will last, but it will be an enjoyable bonus of the experiment.
So that is how people have reacted to the artificially narrated audiobooks. Ultimately, I think that Joanna Penn is right, and we’ll see the bifurcation of audio rights, with “machine-narrated” and “human-narrated” audiobook rights being distinct categories. Some epic lawsuit is going to decide all of that at some point, and I really don’t want to be involved with it. 🙂
Finally, I do think opinion #4 is the most important one, and that for accessibility reasons the technology will eventually be integrated into ereaders and web browsers, allowing you to choose to have the computer read the book or web page to you in a voice and accent of your choosing. In the Gospels, Jesus was pretty clear on the importance of “caring for the ill”, and most major religions tend to put that fairly high on their roster of duties for the faithful. What is accessibility technology if not doing that on a large scale?
-JM