We all like to have a nice audiobook to listen on our journey and daily commuting or to have one as an extention of our labour of love – the book. It has been our case, let’s follow with the audiobook version just slightly behind the e-book release. The production has been in the motion, the person – the woman – I have found on one register – with good communication as well as the ideas about the technical side of the recording and mastering. Before AI production has been returned and my epub format of the book released online.
I am glad that a huge number of music publishing companies act faster than the British funny corrupted elephant in the china bric and brac shop. I don’t think I will shatter the glass ceiling of the music charts with my upcomimg nu jazz single or my quite ok natural lyrical soprano and I don;’t fancy myself that my name and all these versions make any echo across these big companies, but I am proud of my stamp and signature on the petition against the ticket touts and added my AI warning as IT CEO – about the digital twins and personal copyright.
You are welcome to listen to the closing of Polaris book here. You recognise the AI voiceover easily, but I have to monitor it by a special software when it come to the start of the book. The opening and Chapter 1 are less robotic and it sounds quite human voice like, fooling you like in the case I have spoken on the phone with Man with van company, actually there AI chatbot with very distinctive human voice. We know and hear about voice cloning etc, my ehm audiobook was AI produced from Nigeria by Suno and impossible to use it on any distribution network for obvious and good reasons. You are able to do own AI version within Amazon Audible but it is not my cuppa of coffee.
What to do and check instead ? Not like asking the obvious question to Man with van’s almost human identical voice Are you a robot chat bot ? Yes, I am, indeed. It is like with the dating. Don’t do any curious digging regarding assets, look, salary, benefits and juice, but focus just on the human being. I mean the voice. Another sound engineer is capable enough to fix technical stuff, no one will fix horrible or artificial voice. Deezer said in July that it was taking in close to 9000 fully AI-generated tracks a day in June, passing half of all new uploads to its platform for the first time. So imagine that normal huge competiion is surpassed by your stolen vocals or generic artificial sound. Of 1,551 tracks submitted to SIQA’s AI music charts in the first quater of 2026, 90.4% were made using Suno. I am not speaking about possible low quality of the sound for the music song or the audiobook, but having a clear line drawn between natural and fake – generally speaking.
- TRUST BUT VERIFY – use official or trustworthy registers, listing directories for searching your book narrator online. Shop around and ask the questions, check their samples but still be diligent and ask for the informal chat over the Zoom or Facetime to see a person – how she/he speaks. For many reasons – are they a real deal aka real human beings ? and – how you like their natural voice and diction, pauses, tone and colour of the voice in natural conversation.
- ASK FOR SAMPLE – the real professional will never decline to record own voice to read one or two lines from your book and forward it back to you. Don’t focus just on the final cost, but on the voice that sells your story as well as your book as the outcome, carries the emotional hook of your own narrative. It is like finding a good work colleague or the friend for time being of the travel journey.
- BE OPEN – what you want and ask for it, writing down what you expect, how many revisions and style you would like to take or accept and how long for processing and production to take into consideration.
- GO ANALOGUE AND OFFLINE – ask for the references, a word of the mouth, recommendations and advertise at the local arts centre or the college for your ,audiobook’ opening. There are plenty of under the radar local professional actors in the USA or Europe who are not grazing front pages, but their voices are trained and pleasant to listen to. They are often active at the local theatre stages and happy to accept a reasonable voiceover job. If still out of your budget, try amateurish theatre groups.
- SOFTWARE – check the sound on often free sound AI monitoring platforms and have a good sound engineer by your side to fix the technical audio aspect and the requirements for the audiobook.
Having AI produced podcast series under your own umbrella, AI photos for your Instagram posts is fine with one condition – it has to be tagged as AI. Selling non existing or very different service or product such as the audiobook and delivered as the AI narrated robotic reading is a fraud, so providing non existing goods such as clothes or featuring AI profile photo – one fake solicitor of the debtor I have came across. or fake news, cloned voices misused as the song, in the news and so on.
