There’s a famous quotation from noted author Douglas Adams in relation to technology and our familiarity or ease with it:
– Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
– Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
– Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
In some ways the quote is purely humorous, but in others it speaks to an underlying truth about the way in which we view innovations and new technological developments based upon our different perspectives at a given time.
Some things that were wildly innovative at their point of release have become so ordinary and everyday that we can barely imagine the world without them. The paperback book is barely 100 years old in terms of its wide distribution and adoption, but a world where they don’t populate our reading lives seems inconceivable.
Audiobooks are newer in their widespread presence, but we’ve quickly found an indispensable place for them in our reading and listening habits. But how will emerging new approaches to making audiobooks more personalised and tailored be received?
How Are Personalised Audiobooks Made?
Knowing how personalised audiobooks works, starts with learning how personalised audiobooks begin with the same raw materials as any audiobook – a person’s voice and a writer’s book.
Where things diverge is that the voice doesn’t need to read the entire book for the personalised audiobook to be created. Instead a short voice sample is taken and synthesised, then overlaid on the script of the book to create the newly bespoke personalised audiobook version.
How Much of Your Voice Do We Actually Need?
In the infancy of personalised audiobooks, lengthy scripts of several minutes were required to capture the full nuance of a person’s voice to best render the storytelling creation. But the technology has now progressed to the extent that a short reading of perhaps 30 seconds to 1 minute can be more than enough to create a polished product.
In the Dudley Editions app, we choose to provide a short script to keep things focused and reduce confusion for people. We don’t need particular words said in specific ways, just a representative sample of your normal speaking/reading voice to start the process.
How to Record Your Voice for a Personalised Audiobook, and What Happens Next
Once you’ve dealt with our collective shared unease with the sound of recordings of our own voice, the process for making the short voice samples necessary to create a personalised audiobook is fairly straightforward.
Preparing is always a good idea. Picking a script to read, making sure you’re relaxed, making sure your surroundings are quiet and not likely to attract interruptions are all sensible steps.
Then hit the record button and read through the script. You can re-record as many times as you like until your happy with what you’ve captured.
Personalised Audiobook vs Standard Audiobook: What’s the Difference?
Personalised audiobooks will never impinge upon or replace the market for trained professionals or celebrity contributors reading books for widespread reader consumption.
Instead, personalised audio offers a fun new way to take treasured tales and make them personal. This can be for a range of different reasons, whether having a soothing voice on hand to ease a troublesome bedtime for a youngster, bridging distances in far-flung families to maintain connections through shared tales and narratives, or capturing a person’s unique delivery and signature accent so it lives on.
What Is Voice Cloning, and How Is It Different From a Recording?
Voice cloning takes a sample of your voice and extrapolates how that sample will sound when overlaid on different sample texts. While a recording simply captures a single moment, your voice reading a particular script, voice cloning takes the sample and creates a synthesized version that can be applied and re-applied to different contexts.
In the Dudley Editions app, you have complete control over how your voice sample is used and applied – you choose the text, the story, the narrative over which your voice is applied to create your unique, personalised audiobook.
From there, you decide who you want to share it with. A special individual or a whole host of different people – the decision is yours.
You have the flexibility to create new books as and when they are added to the Dudley Editions store without having to provide a fresh voice sample. From just a few minutes of work, you can create a whole selection of personalised gifts to share with your friends and community.
Personalised audiobooks are an innovative and intriguing application of generative voice technology. They open up the opportunity of turning your favourite stories or narrative that are meaningful to you and your circle into treasured, shareable gifts that can delight and illuminate. Why not give this fresh new approach a try next time you’re looking for a special gift for someone you’re keen to connect or re-connect with.
Can Personalised Audiobooks Sound Natural?
One of the most common things people wonder is whether a synthesised voice can really carry the warmth and character of the real thing. It’s a fair question. The reassuring answer is that voice synthesis has come quite a long way in a short space of time. From a brief sample, the technology picks up the rhythm, tone and inflection that make a voice recognisably yours, so the finished audiobook carries your character rather than a flat, mechanical approximation.
Making sure that you record your voice sample in a quiet location with no background noise and in one go helps. It also only takes a few minutes now to get a solid sample that will sound like you.
One of the funny things that comes up occasionally is the uncanny nature of how we, or people we know, sound. We don’t hear ourselves very much, but sometimes when we do, it doesn’t sound like us; but it is, and there is an interesting disconnect between how we think we sound and how we do, but that is a topic we can dive into on a different occasion.