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I have been wondering how improvements in TTS would affect the audiobook world. Perhaps management sees changes coming that will affect the demand for traditional audiobooks.

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Bleeding edge TTS is 95% as good as human actors, at least for the audiobooks I consume. I think that for vast majority of audiobooks, the era of human readers has come to an end.

That said AFAIK Audible buys audibooks from partners and does not voice it themselves, so I think this layoff is unrelated.

But who needs to buy audiobooks when you can get a regular ebook and have it read aloud with a very good voice?

That is the future, but I don't think we are quite so far just yet. Right now quality TTS is very expensive and too slow for realtime. Then there are obvious IP issues. Also many books need subtle edits for audio version.

I don't think we can fully replace editors and publishing houses just yet, at least not while retaining high quality and integration.

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