LitHub: “…In 2005 I auditioned for my first audiobook, a grand 500-page historical fiction retelling of the Robin Hood legend. I realized there was a whole industry out there featuring the beautiful yet simple combination of a voice and a story—I was hooked. I’ve narrated 800 titles now, for publishers large and small, in every genre and style. It’s exhilarating, exhausting, and I would gladly live this literary life till its end, keeping alive the dream of my father, though he is no longer alive to hear it. In 1993, the summer before my freshman year of high school, my father and his wife were killed in a car accident. Due to time and ungentle childhood handling, my cassette collection has dwindled to a single tape that bears his voice. The tape is a yellowed plastic Maxwell with a handwritten label. It’s a corny, spooky story that I believe he wrote called “The Beckon of Hampton Court,” featuring peak 80s sound effects, theremin wails, and nothing else but his voice. For years leading up to the 2020s, the audiobook industry experienced rumblings of the coming robopocalypse. Amazon’s Kindle featured a read-aloud function that could narrate any eBook in its synthetic voice. Various small companies experimented with machine-generated voices, but they never really took off. A major saving grace was that Amazon’s audiobook arm, Audible, the #1 distributor and sales-point of audiobooks, did not allow nonhuman voices on its platform. Indeed, since its inception, Audible claimed to amplify the power of human storytelling. The pessimistic among us suspected that they were only enforcing this policy until they could figure out a way to monetize their own robot voices. We were right.

In November of 2023 the robotic floodgates opened. For the first time, Audible allowed machine voices onto their platform (only their own). Dubbing them “Virtual Voices,” Audible offered Kindle Direct Publisher authors the ability to create audiobooks at the click of a button (called “AI audiobooks” by some). Within a month, over 10,000 robot books were uploaded and for sale. That number grew incredibly fast, within a few months surpassing 50,000 soulless “performances.” At the time of this writing, it hovers around 60,000…”