So it’s not just innovative startups and open source projects that can use generative AI to create amazing innovations. Apple’s giving it a try too.
Today Apple quietly announced it is launching AI narrators for audiobooks in Apple Books, saying that millions of eBooks will never be narrated because small publishers and indie authors can’t afford it.
From my story at Forbes …
Apple quietly launched digital narration technology today that uses artificial intelligence to generate human-sounding narration for books. While it sounds like a dangerously bad idea at first — how will AI know what to emphasize, where to get excited, and where to slow down — the small samples Apple has shared sound surprisingly human.
The initial target: long-tail books that will never be worth paying a human narrator for.
“More and more book lovers are listening to audiobooks, yet only a fraction of books are converted to audio — leaving millions of titles unheard,” Apple says. “Many authors — especially independent authors and those associated with small publishers — aren’t able to create audiobooks due to the cost and complexity of production.”