Apple Just Rolled Out A.I. Audiobooks. What Scares Human Narrators Is That Some of Them Are Pretty Good.

When Apple quietly launched a catalog of A.I.-narrated audiobooks early in January, it was surprising news, and it wasn't. Robot narrators are not new: Alexa provides text-to-speech for Kindle content and Google offers a suite of artificial voices of various genders and accents for those wishing to publish "auto-narrated" audiobooks. The difference is that Apple's four voices--"Madison" and "Jackson" suggested for fiction, "Helena" and "Mitchell" for nonfiction--sound much more natural than the digitally-generated voices available elsewhere, leading to fears that they could replace human narrators altogether. A few of Apple's voices are even noticeably similar to the voices of well-known members of the community of human audiobook narrators. "There's a little tension there," Edoardo Ballerini told me.