Feature Mechanised audiobooks


With digitally generated speech increasingly commonplace, will audiobook users take to long-form narratives read by computer-generated voices? Matthew Rubery investigates


Finding your voice


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EXT-TO-SPEECH ENGINES USING computer-generated voices are all around us. Today’s


notebooks, tablets and smartphones come equipped with synthetic


voices that can read out the screen’s contents. People who are blind or otherwise print-disabled have long relied on screen readers. Websites such as Project Gutenberg offer other people a choice between “human-read” and “computer- generated” audiobooks. And many e-book readers include a text-to-t-to- speech feature, enabling any e-book to be turned into an audiobook... ...The Authors Guild took


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synthetic readers seriously enough to pen an op-ed in the New York Times protesting against the use of text-to-speech on Amazon’s Kindle and other electronic read- ers. According to Roy Blount Jr, the guild’s then-president, this option turns every e-book into a latent


www.thebookseller.com


This is an edited extract from The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard University Press) by Matthew Rubery, professor of modern literature at Queen Mary University of London. Rubery is a keynote speaker at AudioBook Revolution.


audiobook. Since the title’s audio rights—or synthetic audio rights, as the case may be—have not been purchased, text-to-speech seems to be one more way for authors not to get paid in the new digital economy. Blount found the Kindle’s artificial voices to be “quite listenable”, even if they fell short of maestros such as [actor and voice artist] Jim Dale. In other words, they were good enough that audiences might be tempted to listen to them for free instead of paying to hear flesh-and-blood actors. Amazon relented by allowing publishers to disable the text-to- speech option on specific titles. The Authors Guild is right to keep an eye on the gradual encroach- ment of synthetic voices into the publishing industry. The robots are coming for your books! However, when I spoke to engineers at Google about the technology’s future, they told me not to think in terms of robots taking over from humans; they described a continuum with literature performed by professional actors at one end and, at the other, the publishing world’s leſtovers— phone books, instruction manuals, last year’s travel guides—that no one would ever pay somebody to read. The line marking where people are willing to tolerate robots as opposed to humans will continue to slide.


Vocal critics People will probably always prefer to hear literature read aloud by virtuoso performers; Derek Jacobi has nothing to fear from a robotic rhapsode named iOn. Yet more and more people will find synthetic voices satisfactory for those books that are not meant to be life-chang- ing works of art. Sceptics might even succumb to the prospect of hearing dead celebrities (Orson Welles, anyone?) read to them, despite knowing the voice isn’t real. The publishing industry faces an era of customised narration in which the speaker’s voice will be tailored to suit particular narra- tives. The shiſt from human to non- human narration will dramatically influence the book’s reception, as well as ongoing debates over how to read a talking book—what my book, The Untold Story of the Talking Book, calls the politics of narration.


Audiences have grown increas- ingly sophisticated when it comes to judging the fit between narrator and script, especially in terms of sensitive issues such as age, class, ethnicit, gender, nationalit, race and sexualit. To the discerning ear, there’s no such thing as a neutral voice. Casting controversies might be averted, however, if synthetic speech technology were to give audiences a measure of control over the narrator’s identit. Don’t like a man reading to you? Swap him for a woman. The voice sounds too white? Switch to a Latino one. Don’t like British accents? Choose a Texan.


Mechanical love Audiences might even respond to mechanical voices with the same devotion as they do to human ones. A thread running through The Untold Story... is the intimate rela- tionships forged between narrators and their audiences, despite studios’ best efforts to keep the narrators inconspicuous. This is true of nearly every recording, from talking books narrated in so-called neutral voices, to audiobooks read by celebri- ties. In each case, audiences have been susceptible to intense atach- ments. The benefits include a sense of intimacy, companionship and contact—the feeling that someone is speaking directly to you—felt to be missing from encounters with the printed page. What will happen to this relationship when there is no one behind the curtain?


My guess is that people will feel uneasy about synthetic narrators— at first. Audiences will grow used to them, as they have with the speech engines used by other technologies. They will be entertained and even awed by synthetic voices... then dependent on them. Audiences will expect to be able to customise the speaker’s persona to suit their pref- erences, and will become increas- ingly intolerant of unwanted vocal tics among its human counterparts. Knowing that a real person is not actually speaking to them will either have litle impact on the relation- ship’s intensit or, perhaps, cause it to blend in with countless other digi- tal interactions. The later outcome might even return our atention to the words themselves. ×


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