Apple Checks OUT AI-narrated Audiobook Features, Spotify Is Increasingly Hot!

Digital Naration Apple Books feature (photo: dock. Apple)

JAKARTA - Apple Books now has audiobook features narrated by text-to-speech artificial intelligence (AI). The company hopes that this feature is easily accessible to writers and publishers in order to save costs.

Apple's move is claimed to have huge implications for the billion-dollar audio book industry. The Digital Narration feature, where writers and publishers can make it at a more cost-effective and without complexities during the production process.

The Digital Narration feature, representing a major change from today's audiobook model, where the authors themselves have to narrate their books and of course it can take weeks and cost thousands of dollars for publishers.

In addition, this feature can also be used by smaller publishers and writers to issue audiobooks at a much lower cost.

According to Apple's official website explaining the Digital Narration feature, initially the AI narrative would only be available for romance and fiction books, while non-fiction books were in the process of being made.

Currently launching The Verge, Friday, January 6, the service is only available in English. Apple says publishers and writers have audiobook rights, and can remove other versions of audiobooks if they wish.

In fact, Apple intended to launch it in November last year, but was delayed due to chaos in Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk and layoffs on Meta dominating headlines.

Apart from Apple, Spotify has also invested in making audiobooks the third pillar of its streaming service with music and podcasts. But Spotify's audiobook ambitions clash with Apple's rules around in-app payments. Spotify claims Apple is anti-competitioning.