Call Me Jane Jetson

In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t noticed, the world is currently undergoing an explosion of AI/machine-based learning advancements. And you’d have to have been under a rock not to have been confronted with people talking about apps like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or AI narration at every turn for the last several months. And no wonder—the results people are producing with these apps can be truly astonishing in their beauty or simulation of human quality. And they just keep getting better.

Like many people, I’m looking at the ways these apps could transform society and our lives with both a mix of excitement, curiosity, and fear. Which is winning depends on the day. :-) After all, even Rosey Jetson seemed to cause as many problems as she solved.

However, despite my concerns about the potential for a robot-pocalypse, I’m also trying to approach these tools with an open mind toward how they could improve our lives. Because there is no doubt that we are at a pivotal turning points in human history that will resonate through time. AI’s impact will be akin to the invention of the printing press, the gas-powered vehicle, or the Internet.

It’s both exhilarating and terrifying to be alive right now.

So far, my experiments with so-called “robots” have mostly had to do with practical ways to improve my business. For instance, I’ve used an AI-powered app called Timely for several years to reduce the time I spend keeping track of and logging my daily activities. And I’ve played with ChatGPT and am quite excited about the ways I’ll be able to use it as both a research assistant and a brainstorming partner to help me write better, more interesting books and produce them more quickly by accelerating some of my thinking process.

I’ve already mentioned my experiments with AI narration, having had All I Want for Christmas digitally narrated through a company called DeepZen in late 2021, and releasing The Friday Night Date Dress on audiobook last fall, which I created using Google’s auto-narration services.

Since publishing the audiobook of The Friday Night Date Dress, I’ve been working on creating an auto-narrated audiobook of Every Star that Shines. Thanks to multiple other projects taking higher precedence, I didn’t publish it until today.

However, my dallying paid off, as Google Play Books released an update that allowed me to use a limited multi-cast recording feature to differentiate between voices better while listening, which is pretty cool, actually.

After completing the main book, I decided I also wanted to have an audio version of the bonus epilogue I created as a newsletter sign-up cookie, which I couldn’t create using Google’s auto-narration services as it would conflict with their terms of service to not have it available on their platform. So I went looking for other options, and that led me to ElevenLabs.

Even though the service is still in beta, the quality of narration for an audiobook is far beyond anything else I’ve heard. The AI wasn’t just reading the book—it was performing it. Check out this sample of the first few minutes:

Compare this to the sample of the Google auto-narrated audiobook of Every Star that Shines:

While Google’s auto-narration is pretty good, you know you’re listening to a robot. If you didn’t tell me the ElevenLabs version was AI, I probably wouldn’t have guessed.

The ElevenLabs service currently has limitations that makes creating an entire audiobook this way not very feasible for me, time-wise. (One of the many annoying limitations is only being able to render 2.5 minutes of audio at a time, and then you have to stitch all the pieces together in recording software later. For a full-length audiobook, I would need to hire someone to do this for me, because I can’t justify the time investment for myself. And if I’m going to do that, I’m now in the budgetary realm of hiring a narrator—which is completely out of reach right now.) But I’m excited to see where they go from here, because this is such a vast improvement over anything else in the market, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes not only the most financially economical but also time-efficient method of creating audiobooks.

Do I still want to create human-narrated audiobooks for my work? Absolutely. But in the meantime, I’m excited about the many ways that the current explosion in AI technology is enhancing our lives now, and how it will do so into the future.

Frankly, I could go for a J.A.R.V.I.S. to help me with tasks that are currently so time-consuming and costly that they inhibit what I can achieve.

What about you? How do you feel about the current flood of AI technology, and in what ways have you used it, might you use it, or do you refuse to use it? Let me know in the comments!

And if you’re into small town sweet romance on audio, please grab your copy of Every Star that Shines!