Cost of AI-Narrated Apple Books

I post here too much, and something in my brain is screaming, "Don't do it! Don't do it!"
I generally don't prefer narrated books, and much prefer reading them with a screen reader set at an inhuman rate. I read tons and tons of novels. Sometimes I go on a non-fiction reading binge. This is through various libraries to which I pay a small fee. Occasionally, I buy a book on Amazon. I would be utterly penniless if I had to pay the prices of retail, human-narrated books, much less pay the same price for an AI narrated book that, after all, reads too slowly to sound more human.
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I, too, am an Audible junky, and have just began my journey into the Kindle-verse. Regarding Amazon's AI thing, would this be Kindle's Assistive Reader?
I use this feature through the Alexa app on my iPhone, and I am quite impressed with it.

I've been using Eleven Labs for about 6 months now, and here's what a lot of people don't see. I know it's not apple's tech specifically but it's similar.
These companies need to pay money for energy and GPU time (which is super in demand right now). You also have to remember that not as many people will buy each AI narrated book, after all these are not new york times best sellers and such, so they need to make back more money per sale.

I am not able to pay the ever increasing costs for audiobooks. After a lot of searching, I finally found a viable solution.

@voice is free in the Google Play store. An $8.99 one time upgrade enables exporting ebooks to mp3.

If you're an overcast user, a $9.99 annual subscription allows uploads so you can switch between multiple files while not losing your place. You could also listen to your mp3 from the iOS Files app if you prefer.

Hi there! I've been an audible subscriber for 20 years now and I think it's the best solution to have access to literature, whatever the genre (sci-fi and fantasy for me thank you ;) ). Over the years, I've grown familiar with some narrators like R.C. Bray, Ray Porter, Scott Brick, Simon Vance, Dick Hilla nd so on. I value their work and love the way they appropriate the books, authors' tones, to make a real performance of their own and give a new life to the stories. and, I'm totally opposed to see them replaced by an AI, for whatever production-cost issues. Here in France, I am not aware that we have AI-narrated books (through Applebooks or whatever), but I wouldn't be surprised if that would be available any time soon, especially when you see what services like Clipchamp can do. The only situation where I would think that an AI-narration would be desirable is to read some books that are not available in the audio format, I'm thinking of non-fiction books especially. I love history and many of such books are only accessible on eBooks, and I'm not exactly thrilled by having VoiceOver reading them to me.

Long, long ago, back when audio books were on cassette tape, I listened to a couple of James Herriot (James Alfred Wight) books. The narrator had an accent that would be found in England. Not sure why they didn't use someone with a Scotish accent of one sort or another... Later on, I got a hold of another of his books with an Irish accent. It was like having the actor in a TV series replaced with someone who had no resemblance what so ever. I don't like that.
So now I have the screen reader read the book. Authors usually indicate a character's accent if it matters. That works for me, even if the words sound like a grouchy, male robot from England with Espeak, or Samantha on iOS. It's not a recording of a play or a movie with actors, so either the female or male characters are all going to be in the wrong gender, and your mind has to translate that anyway.
* I cut out the long boring diatribe on all the computerized voices I've heard in my life.
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It really doesn't matter how low it costs, wouldn't pay for AI narrated audio books if it costs more than the regular kindle addition. These things are no where near a good narrator yet, as --while they can imitate humans much better-- they still lack understanding of the reading material. Its not significantly beyond a screen reader, and why would I pay for something that my screen reader can do for free?

I think the AI voices are attempting to fool you, singer girl, into thinking they are human, and as the topic says, they can replace the human reader of a book, while charging the same price, eventually getting rid of all the over head and problems associated with humans. It's not quite absurd enough for my tastes. If they could only have AI that pays to listen to AI generated books, paying with AI generated money and being fooled into thinking the voices are actual humans trying to fool the AI into thinking the human readers were trying to sound like AI, I might be amused.
Back in the day, I read a few books on a blind school's Kurzweil reading machine. Kind of like having Stephen Hawking read a book to you. Long before I went blind, though, I remember those ubiquitous Speak & Spell devices with the Texas Instruments voice, late 70s, I think. That might have been the first actual computer voice I remember hearing, though, the Kurzweil voice predates the TI.

And that's probably why I can tolerate Espeak and other robotic sounding voices. It's a skill.
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I can't agree that they shouldnt cost as much.

As TechLover said; you're paying for uptime, GPU usage and stuff like that.

To make this stuff really does put a toll on computer hardware so that's why it costs the same amount. Or it could be that these people are greedy, it's probably both honestly.

Here's an issue, these people are going to clame this is done for the Blind/VI people but I can almost garentee that no one asked any blind/vi people what they want, these companies never do, and just assumed we'd all be thankful little blindies so greatful to hear these books. It's honestly disgusting and perhaps, if I really wanted to go that far, ableist in some kind of way?

Project gootanburg has done this and honestly? they've waisted a huge and i mean huge amount of money on this, I highly doubt anyone is going to listen to these books, I tried and couldn't get past 5 minutes.

I'd love to see the amount of people who actually listened to a book the hole way through with these voices because I can garentee you I'm correct and that either no one or hardly anyone are using these services.

And how much does it cost to run a recording studio for a live person to read for days and days, plus the toll on recording equipment, the electrical and HVAC overhead costs, paying engineers to run the equipment, then days and days of editing and splicing, dubbing, rerecording? Oh, and I forgot, you have to pay the people who are reading the book, and those people have to pay their own bills, etc, etc, etc.

This stuff won't be cheep.

I'm not a huge fan of audiobooks but a lot does go into them.

I can tell you one thing, it can be extremely time consuming. Even if, supposing everything else is done, and you just have to do some final edits... Even when its a short book, say 20, 30 minutes... That can still take up several hours, and that's on the low end. So yeah, it audio books do take a lot of effort. I get that this uses a lot of processing power etc, but I am of the belief that this shouldn't be the same pricing of audio books, because while yes, your paying for processing power, making audiobooks... I mean with AI, it takes way, way fiewer time than say, doing it by a person. I parcially understand the same price tag from that angle, but I don't really think its justified, given the time and effort difference between the two, having personally worked on this myself. Also, from that angle... I'm not sure how many people would go for these books. I mean think about it for a second... You've got the ssame book, one with AI and the other one beeing read by a human... Both have the same price tag... Probably most people will go for human. However, from an author's standpoint, I do see where, and how, this can come handy. You'll probably end up paying way, way less if you do it with AI than if you have a person record it, then editing, re recording, etc. Cost wise, from the point of a author, it is way cheeper, and easier. But yeah putting the AI narrated books prices the same as those read by humans... I dunno, I feel like they should be slitely cheeper, but that's just me.

To be completely honest... I do enjoy listening to the occasional audio books but, i'm so used to hearing my phone read the books for me at this point that... I just use my phone. Hell, given at the speed I listen to books with voiceover... Audio books feel hella slow! heh. That and I guess i'm already used to the way voiceover reads things, pronounces things by now anyway, so yeah.
To be clear, I'm greatful for what they've done, but I feel like maybe, just maybe, asking your target audience hey we're thinking of doing so and so, what do you think? How many would use it, would've been a better idea in the long run, but I digress. There are both good and bad sides to this in equal manner, really.

For what it's worth, I run Alex at a speech rate of 45 on macOS 14.1, and Alex at a speech rate of 60 on iOS 16.6.1. I am waiting to upgrade to iOS 17.x.

Also, to me 45 on macOS sounds the same as 60 on iOS.

Go figure...

For me, my mileage with different voices varies. With eloquence, I can dial it up to 60 before it becomes unintelligible for me. Same with Vocalizer voices like Tom and Samantha on iOS. I also use the 1Core voices on Windows and the neural voices, however, and I don't like how those sound when sped up. So I try to have them as close to natural human talking speed as possible. As for audiobooks, I'm of two minds. Dramatized audiobooks, such as those produced by graphic audio, are my favorite form of entertainment, and the amount of work that goes into producing those definitely justifies the cost. But I would never purchase an AI-narrated audiobook for the same price. Why? Because, to my way of thinking, if I want to have an AI voice read to me, I can just hop onto my phone or PC; I do it all the time, using VoiceDream on iOS or Bookworm on Windows or, occasionally, the books app on Mac or iOS. That costs me nothing, and unless they've figured out a way to make AI add expression to their voices that even human narrators can struggle with, it would be a waste of good money.

If AI manages to switch voices on the fly, add expression and do more than 11labs, which is doing an amazing job by the way, can do, then I might consider buying it.

I probably won't though as I think I'll always prefer human voices.

It's interesting though, I quite happily read fan fiction with eliquence and can't imagine it any other way but my friend Amin who's also blind uses the windows core voices I believe. I can't imagine those voices reading a fan fiction to me but he enjoys it and that's all that matters.

I think for us, blind people, we can hear when a voice is AI vs human, but a lot of people can't/don't care. There's a lot of reddit channels these days read by AI and I don't like them but they get thousands of subscribers so it's all down to what you like.

Speaking of AI reading fanfiction, there's an app that does exactly that; it's a shame it isn't available on iOS.

They mentioned an iOS version is in the works, but that was about three or four months ago.

I believe it's called FanPods.

Personally, I wouldn't use human-sounding speech for fanfiction, especially when most stories are riddled with mistakes or typos.

On the rare occasion that I read an actual book, I prefer to use a robotic voice, such as Eloquence, eSpeak, or even Fred.

That's my preference.

I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but it often takes a long time and much thinking for me to come up with a full opinion. With a screen reader reading a book, as apposed to AI narrated books, I can usually navigate the book from pages to characters, and also copy a word to look up, or check the spelling of a word. That alone blows recorded AI books out of the water for me. I buy a human read book not expecting to be able to do this, but AI is done by computers, and I have different expectations of computers. With that thought, I wouldn't pay any amount of money for a recording of AI reading a book. It seems like a ripoff if being marketed to blind people.
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What OldBear said.