Meet Madison and Jackson, the AI narrators or "digital voices" soon to be reading some of the audiobooks on Apple Books. They sound nothing like Siri or Alexa or the voice telling you about the unexpected item in the bagging area of your supermarket checkout. They sound warm, natural, animated. With their advanced levels of realism, Apple's new AI voices present the genuine possibility that the listener will be unaware of their artificiality. Even the phrase used in Apple's catalogues of digitally-narrated audiobooks – "this is an Apple Books audiobook narrated by a digital voice based on a human narrator" – is ambiguous.

Radio amateur William "VE4VR" Franzin has put a little artificial intelligence on the airwaves by creating a voice assistant powered by OpenAI's controversial ChatGPT -- accessible using a radio capable of Very High Frequency (VHF) transmissions. "In this case we're using a D-STAR digital voice repeater on VHF," Franzin explains of the project, "which will receive my test transmission, which is digital voice, and then that's sent over the internet to a server in a a data center which has a Northwest Digital Radio ThumbDV AMBE transcoder plugged into it. The voice is transcoded to plain digital voice, it's run through a speech-to-text engine, which is then run through ChatGPT and then all the way back, transcoded, and comes back to the radio." OpenAI launched ChatGPT last November, offering a simple webchat-like interface to its text-based generative adversarial network (GAN) technology. Type in a message, and ChatGPT replies -- mimicking understanding but, in reality, simply stringing together the statistically most-likely words you would expect from a response.

When you browse Apple Books for your next audiobook, you might come across a few titles with a note that says they were "Narrated by Apple Books." That's because the tech giant has released a catalogue of titles that make use of its new AI-powered digital narration service. The company said the service uses the advanced speech synthesis technology it developed "to produce high-quality audiobooks from an ebook file." According to The Guardian, Apple approached independent publishers who may be interested in teaming up for the project's launch in recent months. Authors were reportedly told that the company behind the technology would shoulder the costs of turning their books into audiobooks and that they would be earning royalties.

Over the past year, I wrote about a bunch of companies working on voice synthesis technology. They were very much in the early stages of development, and only had some pre-made samples to show off. Now, researchers hailing from the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms at the Universite de Montreal have a tool you can try out for yourself. It's called Lyrebird, and the public beta requires just a minute's worth of audio to generate a digital voice that sounds a lot like yours. The company say its tech can come in handy when you want to create a personalized voice assistant, a digital avatar for games, spoken-word content like audiobooks in your voice, for when you want to preserve the aural likeness of actors, or for when you just love the sound of your own voice and want to hear it all the time.

Get ready for the little person living inside your phone and speaker to sound a lot more life-like. Google believes it has reached a new milestone in the quest to make computer-generated speech indistinguishable from human speech with Tacotron 2, a system that trains neural networks to generate eerily natural-sounding speech from text, and they have the samples to prove it. In a research paper published earlier this month, though yet to be peer-reviewed, Google asserts that previous approaches to text-to-speech (TTS) systems have thus far failed to achieve a genuinely natural sound. Techniques such as concatenative synthesis, in which pre-recorded samples of speech are stitched together, and statistical parametric speech synthesis, Google says have been insufficient, explaining, "The audio produced by these systems often sounds muffled and unnatural compared to human speech." With Tacotron 2 (which is not the same as the world-ending super-weapon used by Lord Business), the company says it has incorporated ideas from its previous TTS systems, WaveNet and the first Tacotron, to reach a new level of fidelity.