DeepZen is a company that creates computer voices for use in audiobooks, based on the real voices of human actors. The quality is terrifying: good enough to listen to for hours. The gimmick here is the AI component, which can read the text and infer the appropriate emotional response based on the context. It then puts that emotion into the voice.
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It's impressive and very useful. But do we really want a homogenized audiobook experience? And what about those voice actors?
“From an independent publisher's perspective, anything that lowers the cost of audiobook production is very interesting,” Rick Carlile, owner of independent publisher Carlile Media, told Lifewire via email.
"But that appeal presupposes that the product would be of the same quality as traditional storytelling. I don't think we're 100 percent there yet. Don't get me wrong, DeepZen is astonishingly good. It's a tremendous breakthrough and its creators deserve immense credit and success. But it's not perfect yet."
