_good_ audiobooks require the reader to have consistent voices for each character, express the correct emotion for the particular scene, and intone some sort of personality into the book.
Now, you can make very passable recordings of a book using something like amazon's polly. You can make it more bearable when you inject verbal clues using the markup tool. But. It still feels rubbish listening to it.
However its a shit tonne cheaper, so its probably going to seep in because people want profit more than art, but it would have to be made cheaper for it to take off. There is librevox who've been around for years. They have volunteers to read books and they distribute them with permissive licenses. However thats not as popular as audible. Partly because of content, partly performance.
I think the 1-2 years estimate is a bit short. Right now, a computer can create a droning audiobook out of a written book. Within the next few years, generative models will create cheap mediocre audiobooks.
But the technology is changing very rapidly. I would expect that by 2030 generative models will have the ability to produce some very good audio. Possibly on par with professional human voice actors.
_good_ audiobooks require the reader to have consistent voices for each character, express the correct emotion for the particular scene, and intone some sort of personality into the book.
A good example is Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Rivers-of-London-Audiobook/B004... listen to the free sample) He makes the characters different, and the main character PC grant comes alive in his voice.
A negative example is https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Breakfast-of-Champions-Audioboo... where John Malkovich lethargically stumbles his way through, like a bored supply teacher with a cracking hangover and no lesson plan.
Now, you can make very passable recordings of a book using something like amazon's polly. You can make it more bearable when you inject verbal clues using the markup tool. But. It still feels rubbish listening to it.
However its a shit tonne cheaper, so its probably going to seep in because people want profit more than art, but it would have to be made cheaper for it to take off. There is librevox who've been around for years. They have volunteers to read books and they distribute them with permissive licenses. However thats not as popular as audible. Partly because of content, partly performance.