The human arsenal might be expansive beyond all limits, but it has still never possessed anything more valuable than that tendency of ours to grow on a consistent basis. This is because the stated tendency has already enabled us to hit upon some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a rather unique member of the group. The reason why technology’s credentials are so anomalous is, by and large, based on its skill-set, which ushered us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look a little bit closer, it should become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired by the way we applied those skills across a real-world setting. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence and made it the ultimate centrepiece of every horizon. Having such an ingenious piece run the show, unsurprisingly enough, scaled up the human experience from all conceivable directions, but even after reaching so far ahead, the prodigious concept of technology will somehow continue to bring the right goods to the table. This dynamic, in particular, has only grown to become a lot more evident in recent times, and truth be told, Apple’s latest move might just make that trend a lot bigger and better moving forward.

Apple Books has officially launched AI-generated audiobooks to make this digital piece of content “more accessible to all”. According to certain reports, the feature, at least during the initial phase, will only be available for romance and some other fiction genres like literary, historical, and women’s fiction. Here, it will be available in two digital voices, Madison and Jackson. However, the division is also set to launch two new voices called Helena and Mitchell, who’ll stay dedicated to the non-fiction work. Furthermore, the service, for now, is only available in English. Apple’s AI-driven take on audiobooks, interestingly enough, provides an outlook that is completely different from the approach of its biggest competitor in this space i.e. Amazon. In case you are not aware, Amazon’s Audible platform works around a strict policy, which states that all published content “must be narrated by a human” Now, the company did use to offer a text-to-speech feature, but even that was discontinued over copyright concerns. In order to avoid a similar challenge, Apple’s website lays out rather explicitly that all the relevant rights are retained by the author and their publisher. Hence, if they feel like, they can go ahead and publish other versions of the audiobook.

“Apple Books digital narration brings together advanced speech synthesis technology with important work by teams of linguists, quality control specialists, and audio engineers to produce high-quality audiobooks from an ebook file. Apple Books has long been on the forefront of innovative speech technology and has now adapted it for long-form reading, working alongside publishers, authors, and narrators,” Apple said

Up until now, the standard idea to prepare your audiobook would involve authors themselves doing all the narration. However, this method has proven to be hugely time-consuming and expensive, therefore making it inaccessible for most small-scale publishers out there. By getting AI to do the core chunk of the job, we make a meaningful cut back across both those metrics.

According to report from The Guardian, Apple had hoped to launch the service back in November 2022, but with Elon Musk’s sensational acquisition of Twitter and Meta’s layoffs dominating the headlines, it chose to wait out for a less crowded window.