Using Amazon's Virtual Voices for Audiobooks

Virtual voices have come a long way with Amazon's new selection of realistic narrators that employ AI technology to interpret tone and inflections. I have previously used ACX with human narrators for two of my other books: The Ghosts of Culpeper Antiques and In Search of Good Times, which cost me a total of $1300 to produce. Amazon's new Audiobooks with Virtual Voice has a big advantage: it's free to use.

So I gave it a try for my first book—a memoir of sorts—Musings of a Dysfunctional Life, and I couldn't be happier. Take a listen to one of the short "musings" below:

Once you have an eBook version of your book and have been selected as a beta user of Virtual Voice, you are able to select from a wide variety of voices, both male and female, and several nationalities. You can even use different voices for different chapters, if you want. 

There are a few kinks, as you might expect:

1. Sometimes it will read a word incorrectly. Here's an example of "leads" oddly interpreted as "leds" when I want it to sound like "leeds." To change the pronunciation, you highlight the word or phrase and type in how you want the narrator to say it.

2. If there isn't enough emphasis in a sentence, you can sometimes force it with an exclamation mark at the end. In the highlighted sentence below, I replaced the period after roof with a ! in the edit box to make the whole sentence have a bit more pizzazz.

Unfortunately, the technology doesn't emphasize italicized words, yet, so you have to play around with that. I have also had luck replacing a period with (...) or a colon (:) to switch up the inflection of the last words within a sentence. It seems to predict how to say something before it gets there. You can also add commas in the edit box if it rushes through a phrase.

3. In the same example above, you can see that I added a pause between the chapter number and the title. You can select a short, medium, or long pause with the editing tools on the right. Just place your cursor where you want to have more of a pause, and you can add one. The default is Short. Though it does pause automatically between paragraphs, sometimes you might want a bit more if the narration seems rushed.

4. You can also change the voice speed of highlighted portions with the editing tools, but 25% faster and 25% slower are a bit too much either way. I hope they add a 10% option as well. For my book, I kept the pace at the default speed.

Once you complete the fine tuning of your audiobook, you can publish it to Amazon and it will also appear on Audible. Check out my entire audiobook for Musings here.

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