For now at least I bet this’ll be pretty mediocre. I’m a big audiobook fan and voice actors have a massive impact on the quality of the finished product. A great voice actor can make a mediocre book fun and engaging, a bad one can make a great book unlistenable. The best do great voice differentiation. As an example I’ve really enjoyed Andrea Parsneau’s work in The Wandering Inn series.

I just wrote a novel (finished first draft yesterday). There's no way I can afford professional audiobook voice actors—especially for a hobby project.

What I was planning on doing was handling the audiobook on my own—using an AI voice changer for all the different characters.

That's where I think AI voices can shine: If someone can act they can use a voice changer to handle more characters and introduce a great variety of different styles of speech while retaining the careful pauses and dramatic elements (e.g. a voice cracking during an emotional scene) that you'd get from regular voice acting.

I'm not saying I will be able to pull that off but surely it will be better than just telling Amazon's AI, "Hey, go read my book."

AI will write them and AI will read them to us.

I am okay with this only in cases where 1) the author approves, and 2) there is no audible version anyways.

Some people prefer listening to their books instead of reading and that's totally ok. Indie authors can't always afford to hire a narrator but I'd still want the buyers to be able to listen to the book.

Big question is, will the author get paid for the download or not...

Save a profile in tts server, then go into read > tts settings and change voice to profile you saved. I don't remember but you may need readera premium.

I will Avoid Audio books with AI voices. I prefer the warmth of a human voice instead. A lot of my favorite Audiobooks are elevated by the interpretation of the professional actor. I am glad I have never even touched the Audible service, now I never will. I will also never consume anything written by a fucking AI.