Just See Yourself, Now Available as an Audiobook.

A few weeks ago, I got an interesting email from Amazon.

The horror stories you've heard about AI are somewhat exaggerated, as are the benefits of its use. But AI does present an opportunity for Amazon's self-published authors.

Audiobooks are as popular as any other kind of book. But making them is harder, because it's a whole other skill set of editing/performing/recording. A proper audio version of a book takes at least one paid performer, and some serious recording equipment for a crisp sound, with no background noise or static.

AI, on the other hand, can take the whole book full of text, and generate a voice pattern reading it.

Apparently, Amazon has put together a beta program for some authors, to have their books 'translated' into audio files, which are then up for sale.

I was added to the beta list. 

"Just See Yourself" is now available as an audiobook, on Amazon and Audible. It just went live, so the other audible stores haven't been updated yet. Give it a day or two, as with the Kindle store. (In fact, being in Australia, I use Audible AU, so you'll be able to get it before I will. I'm putting my reputation in the hands of Amazon engineers. 😬)

Now, before anybody gets too excited, a few caveats:

1) This is an AI generated reading. I've spent three weeks going through the audiobook, line by line, correcting mispronunciations and typos. (In all honesty, JSY was my first book, and has the worst amount of mistakes, since I was writing/editing the whole thing myself.) While the book is read accurately, the 'flow' of it is... artificial. The AI takes its cue on inflection from punctuation and algorithms. It'll feel stilted in places.

2) This is a beta version of the generator. The options on what I can 'generate' with it are limited. It's likely that later versions will be more accurate, more 'natural', or even let me use different voices for different characters, but this is all theoretical at this point. Which leads us to...

3) I won't be putting the rest of the series into audio format right away. In truth, this task has been infuriating to edit all the way through. It's incredibly time consuming, 'listening' to 120,000 words for errors takes forever. (Looking back, I'm now convinced JSY is the worst thing I've ever written. 😅 ) It's possible I might add one or two more if there's interest, but I'd rather the AI be 'out of beta' before I put all my books through it; and there's no way to know how long that will take.

Plenty of people have asked, and Amazon has delivered a way. The audio versions will come; but for right now, this is a 'test flight'. I have no idea how this will turn out, aside from the preview version I've been editing. It could end up 'generating' something entirely different.