This is not a good move. Some narrators add a lot to the book with their tone and inflection while AI just doesn’t do that. It can’t understand the story and add subtle emotion to its voice.
We’ve had text-to-speech for a long time. The new element is that a context aware processing model explicitly can “understand” the story and add emotion to vocalization.
That said, Amazon can fuck all the way off with this. Let people do art and performance. Figure out how to intelligently automate your warehouses and distribution centers and don’t stop paying the people you make redundant.
Fuckin’ Bezos, man.
There’s place for both, a lot of authors simply can’t afford to have their entire book narrated by a voice actor.
Libro.fm is an awesome alternative to Audible. All of their audiobooks are DRM free and you can choose to have a portion of each purchase go to a local bookstore.
Google play books already has an auto read feature so no need for audio books if they go the Ai route. Just add the epubs you want to your Google library and let it read then to you.
Librera is a great Google Play Books alternative, and the auto read voice is much better.
It sounds great but doesn’t look like it syncs across devices or have web browser accessible features, both things I make heavy use of.