Starling believes Findaway misused material the authors and narrators assigned to it. “This is immoral and illegal,” Starling told WIRED, “The copyright holder only has the copyright to the production of the audiobook, not the voice of the narrator.” She is pausing the release of three upcoming titles that she plans to distribute through Findaway.
Interest in automating the art of book narration has grown in recent years for business and technology reasons. Audiobook sales continue to grow even as sales of books and ebooks decline and voice synthesis technology has improved significantly. ONE many tools have cropped up allows anyone to transcribe voices for one-click synthetic narration, but to enhance them, companies still need data warehouses.
In industries like entertainment and games, contracts that require voice actors allow tech companies to train their AI models to create digital narratives for their work. becoming more popular, said Tim Friedlander, president of the National Voice Actors Association based in the United States. Adobe, maker of Photoshop and other imaging software, recently started train your own AI algorithms about the work of visual ads unless they opt out.
“Voice is how voice actors make a living,” adds Friedlander, “and this is literally taking words out of our mouths without our consent.”
Google start offering Free compilation narration for books in 2020. When Apple announced With its own digital audiobook narration set in January, the company said it hopes to eliminate the “cost and complexity” that producing human-narrated audiobooks can cause for publishers. Small publishing and independent author. The company’s Books app lists titles with AI narration as “narrated in digital voice based on a human narrator”.
Apple has used synthetic voice technology for years, including its virtual assistant Siri, driving directions, and accessibility features. But some authors and storytellers suspect that the audio from their e-books has helped the company hone its technology to perform the complex task of telling book stories. The length of the audiobooks, the complexity of the material, and the impressive skills of the talented storytellers make dub books arguably the toughest challenge facing synthetic voice technology.
Applying synthetic voices to books also brings new business and cultural challenges. Love of SAG-AFTRA said: “Most of the companies that develop these AI technologies come from the technology sector, rather than the entertainment sector. “They lack the relationships, protection histories, and reliance on approval that voice actors have come to expect.”
Several authors told WIRED that Findaway has emerged as a trusted distributor, offering lucrative deals for listing audiobooks on several platforms. But they also say that Findaway often prompts people to agree to updated agreements, often with minor changes, when they log into their accounts. The company added a machine learning provision to its distribution agreements in 2019.
Many people suspect that they signed the machine learning clause without realizing it. Laura VanArendonk Baugh, an author in Indianapolis, Indiana, said: “It was my fault at first for not paying attention to the complement and its full meaning. “But the location is also a bit sneaky.”
