Do you want to create ai-narrated audiobooks?
Audiobooks narrated by a human being will always be the best experience for the reader, but it can be very expensive for an indie author. So you are looking at having your books narrated through AI technology, which is less expensive.
In English, you are familiar with the language, but it´s time consuming to listen to each chapter, spotting things that require editing. Some narrators are not good with pauses before names (“Good morning, Sam”) or question tags, pauses at ellipses or semicolon, even with pronunciation of words that have different stress depending on whether they are used as nouns or verbs.
Moreover, what do you do when you want to have an audiobook in a language you do not speak? Which narrator is the best choice? Does it sound natural? Is everything correctly pronounced?
I have been working on Spanish audiobooks and I noticed that, while some AI narrators do sound more natural than in the past, they still have some issues that need editing. Here are two main examples I had to deal with:
- Pauses on commas before a name, as in “Buenos días, María” (Good morning, Maria”), sound too artificial as the narrator makes too long a pause. For it to sound more natural, it needs to be removed.
- Some monosyllabic words are not accented, even though they have 3 letters or more, like “rio” (simple past of “reír” -To laugh), and are pronounced with the stress on the “o”. However, the narrator stresses the “i” and pronounces it like “río” (river). So for it to pronounce it correctly, it has to be written as “rió”.
I have also noticed the narrator does not recognize well the pause for semicolon and ellipses, or it does not make any pause in a long sentence that does not have a comma, where a human being will stop to breathe.
Also, you need to check the pronounciation of foreign names or other words, which you would probably need to rewrite as it is said in Spanish (“Amy” will have to be written as “Eimi” for the narrator to pronounce it correctly).
I can help you edit all those details so that the audiobook sounds as natural as possible (knowing it will never sound like a human narrator), and create the audio files.
If you want to use the audio to make videos for YouTube, you can send me the image you want to use (probably the book cover) and I´ll combine them for you to have your audiobook on video.