I am an avid consumer of audiobooks and I will never pay/listen to anything AI-generated. Maybe it's just me, I don't know, but just because they have shown that it is technically feasible, that doesn't mean that there is a market for it. I am skeptical. Listening to audiobooks is already a compromise over reading the book, listening to an AI-generated audiobook sounds to me like a bit too much. But let's see.
Check out audio fiction podcasts. Some do full productions of short stories. Depending on the work, reading the text is a compromise over listening to the reading. For instance, music is extremely important to these two stories by Aliya Whiteley:
Obviously there are lots of short snippets of audio that are machine generated. But, no, at the current state of the art I'm not going to listen to a machine generated audiobook much less pay for it.
I would agree but there is one big exception: books I really want to read but there's no audiobook version.
I have a particular interest in early Mormon history and the history of the western US, and there are some really great books that aren't available as audio. I ended up generating some with aws and while the voice annoyed me, I was willing to do it, and the cost was much higher than a normal audiobook would cost.
I think in reality, the more popular books will get a pro reading, but as long as it's labeled, there will be a market for ai audiobooks.
For now, actual voice actors make audiobooks listening way more enjoyable.
Those AI voices are convincing but lack the soul, emotions and art direction of actual voice acting. Think about listening to a book for 8 hours with a monotonous AI voice reading it...
I mostly listen to real audiobooks now so I understand their appeal, but I have also listened to dozens of books using the primitive TTS built into my old Kindle (keyboard model). TTS was rough at first but I knew it could work, because I know blind people use it, so I stuck with it and I found that after a few hours I no longer perceived the awkwardness and it became an effective and satisfying way for me to 'read' books. Brain plasticity is a marvel.
I was quickly put off by the monotone voices. Maybe it’ll improve in a couple of years, but until then I’m sticking to real voice actors. For some books like Greenlights, I reckon you miss out on most of the impact if you don’t hear it in Matthew‘s voice.
It seems pretty obvious that, at least at this point, the competition is either people doing this sort of thing as a hobby or (maybe) at race to the bottom wages. (Or not at all--as is largely the case with machine transcription vs. human transcription.)
If I want mediocre text to speech, I have that on my Kindle.