Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour.
Apple’s approach to digital narration is the opposite of competitor Amazon’s, whose Audible rules explicitly state that submitted audiobooks “must be narrated by a human.” Notably, its Kindles used to offer a text-to-speech feature, but this was discontinued a decade ago after copyright concerns were raised. At least one AI-narrated audiobook has appeared on Amazon’s service in the past, according to this report from Wired, but it was removed after being reported.
While working, I’m constantly switching between such apps, probably hundreds of times a day - and so do you, I assume. How do you do that? Do you Cmd+Tab? Is it up to an app launcher such as Spotlight or Alfred? Maybe some fancy shortcuts involving 2-3 modifier keys? Clicking an icon in the Dock, even?
So, here’s the trick: assign each of your top-12 most used apps to an F-key.
Instead of fighting Apple, Chipolo has opted to work with the Cupertino tech giant — and even credits Apple for helping further grow the item tracker industry. The team also sees the opportunity to integrate with the Find My app as a better consumer experience compared with its much smaller first-party finding network, which today is around 1 million monthly active users.
This is a huge help for new and intermediate birders. For one, I could quickly determine if it was a common bird that I could easily photograph at my backyard feeder or a less common visitor worth continuing to search for. By separating the different bird calls I was hearing, I could also follow one particular call and narrow it down to one tree rather than several.
But if people were interested in a lower cost 6.7-inch iPhone that lacked the high-end features found in Apple's Pro models, they would have embraced the iPhone 14 Plus. That they haven't — at least, reportedly — suggests that there's not much Apple is going to be able to do to convince them that the iPhone 15 Plus is a better option. Sometimes, you just have to concede that less is more, especially when it comes to phone releases.
I've been a subscriber to Audible for more than ten years now, and audiobooks have been a constant companion on my countless commutes. So, I am not unfamiliar with many wonderful narrators and authors reading in my ears. And the AI narrator voices demonstrated by Apple on this web page is quite alright.
Also, my preference is for the narrator not to do voices, or switch accents, or for an audiobook to have so many different voices that the book becomes a radio play. So, I am bias for what a computer voice can do better.
However, because of all the copyright and stuff that prevented words printed on paper to be also read out loud by a computer, I doubt we will get a lot more audiobooks available cheaply and easily from Apple.
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And, since we are on the subject of Apple Books -- I will like to complain (yet again) that Apple Books store is still not available where I live. (All we get on the store are public domain books and Apple's manuals.)
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Thanks for reading.