India is still only at 60% internet penetration, but given that equates to 833 million of India’s 1.4 billion people online, it’s nigh impossible to exaggerate the potential here for publishers and authors willing to step outside the Luddite box and embrace the possibilities AI brings to the industry.
Reporting for The Hindu, Sahana Venugopal says HarperCollins India CEO Ananth Padmanabhan is firmly in the pro camp for AI-narrated audiobooks, but for now the problem for Indian publishers is finding the right AI voice in a world where, for now at least, American English and British English AI-blended voices dominate the field.
Safe to assume it won’t be long before Padmanabhan strikes oil and English-language AI with a firm Indian accent becomes a feature of the market, and in fact the HarperCollins CEO is more convinced than I am, it seems.
Per The Hindu, Padmanabhan explained: “I can tell you, you won’t know the difference. That’s where it’s getting to. Unless I tell you ‘this is AI-narrated,’ (or) ‘this is human-narrated’ while we are listening to it, I don’t think you’ll catch it. In non-fiction and other places, I don’t think it’ll matter. I think it’ll matter in fiction where the narrative brings pause, where the narrator brings a lot more.
”Read more over at The Hindu:
Such sobering realism is a welcome change in an industry where so many headless chickens are running loose.
Padmanabhan doesn’t speculate beyond the remit of the article, but I would suggest that the real boom in AI-generated audiobooks will come when AI is up to speed with India’s myriad indigenous languages and can not just voice but, not too many years distant, simultaneously translate and voice books between multiple languages.
India is still only at 60% internet penetration, but given that equates to 833 million of India’s 1.4 billion people online, it’s nigh impossible to exaggerate the potential here for publishers and authors willing to step outside the Luddite box and embrace the possibilities AI brings to the industry.
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