Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Tag: #AIAudio

An Update on AI Audio

January 8, 2024 /

AI is the current hot topic in many areas of our lives at the moment – from an AI engine being the first level of customer support, or those incessant robo-calls, to “creating” stories or images.

I have been following the various legal cases that are currently in flight, but that isn’t the focus this week. Instead I want to talk a little about AI audio which in the past two years has gone from almost pariah to an accepted medium.

As I mentioned in the posting of October 2022, I ran my novel Thieves in the Temple through the free Google Audio converter and played around a little with the various voice options. I didn’t do much more than that, and made it available on Google Play for the same price as the paperback. At the time, Google Play was the only place to make it available.

Fast forward to today, and those options have grown dramatically. The AI audio files from Google Play can now be made available on Kobo, Draft to Digital, and Book Funnel to name a few.

The feedback I had on the audio sales showed me there are still some tweaks I need to make to the text so the AI can interpret the words more easily. Those tweaks are on my schedule for the first quarter of 2024 so by the second quarter, the audio of Thieves in the Temple and the sequel novel Death at a Wedding will be available more widely.

Stay tuned for updates.

2022 – Sad, Bad, and Good

December 8, 2022 /

My original thought for this looking back on 2022 blog was Good, Bad and Sad., but that means finishing on a low note, and overall that isn’t my intention for 2022. So let’s begin with the sad.

At the end of July, one of my best friends passed away. Chris had been battling cancer for many years, and seemed to have everything under control until the day after her son’s wedding, her heart decided otherwise. Through all her travails. I never saw Chris anything but upbeat and positive. Like everyone else who knew her, I will miss her smiles and infectious laughter.

Bad really falls into two categories. There’s life-bad and bad-to-good. On life-bad my writing fell off a cliff in July and really only picked up in November. Of course that totally derailed my writing goals for 2022 and has made me reconsider what’s really achievable each year. More on that when I look at 2023.

Bad-to-good covers my day-job world. In late September we signed a contract extension with our current client through the end of 2023. Just before Thanksgiving here in the US, the company decided we should be full-time employees or we were gone. I’ve been humbled by the number of people who suggested options when they knew I might be available in January, and now I have a contract that covers all of 2023, which is a good segue into the good part of 2022.

On the writing front, even though I won’t reach all my goals for 2022, I did publish five story collections and converted Thieves in the Temple to AI Audio as I mentioned previously.

Finally, at the beginning of this month (December), my daughter got married and I had the privilege of walking her down the aisle.

Overall a good year.

Thoughts on AI Audio

October 18, 2022 /

The use of an artificial intelligence voice to produce an audio version of a work of fiction or non-fiction has been around for quite a while now. Early versions were clearly early versions. The voices were monotone and robotic sounding and not really suited to the nuances and inflexions of a fiction story.

Time has passed, and the quality and ability of the AI voice to sound more human has improved in leaps and bounds. Joanna Penn provides regular updates on her podcasts (The Creative Penn Podcast: Writing, Publishing, Book Marketing, Making A Living With Your Writing | The Creative Penn), and earlier in the summer, she spoke about a new, and currently free, service on Google Play that takes your text manuscript and converts it to audio, with the option to select one of several AI voices.

As an experiment, in June, I put Thieves in the Temple through the process and added it to my Google Catalog along with the eBooks (Thieves in the Temple by Richard Freeborn – Audiobooks on Google Play). The quality wasn’t bad, so I priced the audio the same as the paperback, and added a notation it’s AI narrated. I intended to put a proper cover on it, like the eBook and paperback versions, but something bright and shiny distracted me, and I never got around to it.

And I’ve sold copies! That surprised me as I’ve done no marketing or promotion, just added it to the catalog and left it there. It’s now my top seller on Google!

Who knew?

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