The 80% solution: Pair with a professional narrator who has consented to have their voice modeled by this (see the note at the bottom about what they held back from open sourcing). This generates a beta, and then you can pay the human narrator to rework specific sections you’re unhappy with.

Yea, hard to say because the obvious implementation would be to just have it built into phones once the model is potentially portable enough - I see this happening quicker as a more general TTS functionality much like Google is doing with 'subtitles anywhere' aka Live Caption. Paired with translations we maybe pretty close to the universal translator type functionality. I could see end users being able to customize their voice assistant even more or maybe having multiple based on if its talking for you or to you.

Anyways the problem with this is it makes the product 'ai audiobook' basically worthless, why not just buy the eBook and have my personalized translator turn it into an audio book. Now you just have market differentiation between cheap ebook + ai narrator vs expensive + professional narration.

Though narration costs are already pretty cheap - it really does not factor into the cost of publishing an audio book that much unless its really a bottom of the barrel book.