The book market is read by robots

Russian book services and publishing houses have begun to actively implement artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for dubbing audio books. In the future, such algorithms can help to significantly speed up and reduce the cost of production in the segment, market participants hope, by increasing sales. But experts note that the technology cannot yet fully replace the speaker and is not suitable for all types of literature.

The Stroky book service (owned by MTS) plans to voice more than 10,000 works in 2023 using artificial intelligence developed by the MTS AI division, Kommersant was told in the company. At the first stage, 600 works are already in the works. The books will be recorded using the Audiogram platform, which is based on neural networks, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) technologies. It allows you to synthesize speech, place stresses and pauses, reproduce interrogative, incentive and other intonations, the MTS specified. Investments in the project are not disclosed.

The leader of the audiobook market, LitRes Group (LitRes, MyBook, Livelib, etc. services), is also developing audiobook dubbing using AI, says Yevgeny Selivanov, director of the group’s content development department: “We launched such dubbing back in the fall of 2020, but began to actively use in the fall of 2022. It is based on SpeechKit speech recognition and synthesis technology, on which the Alice voice assistant works (developed by Yandex.— “b”)”. Yandex confirms the growing demand for AI technologies in the cloud for voicing a wide variety of texts: “With the help of the mentioned SpeechKit technology, more than 100 thousand hours of audio books were voiced in 2022.”

In 2022, LitRes recorded and released about 6,000 books dubbed by “live” voices, but “autoreaders” dubbed 3,000 books at once in two months. The cost of dubbing one book with the help of AI is 400–700 rubles, Evgeny Selivanov clarified: “The algorithm allows you to produce several times more books in a period than a distributed team of readers.” Unlike standard robotic voice acting, he says, AI remembers the pauses marked by the editor, placing them on its own, which avoids distortion.

Now more than 90% of books on the Russian market do not have an audio version, they say in MTS, and their transformation into an audio format, according to the company, in the traditional way “would take years.” “It takes about 30-60 minutes to prepare the initial version of audiobooks with the help of AI, while a studio recording with a live voice takes up to several days, taking into account technical processing and editing,” MTS explained. The interlocutor of “Kommersant”, close to the company, clarified that the cost of voicing one unit of content due to AI is reduced “at least ten times”. According to him, the work of an announcer costs from 50 thousand rubles. for the book.

Publishers are also experimenting with AI. Eksmo-AST President Oleg Novikov says that the group uses AI, among other things, to predict the circulation of reprints and analyze the potential of a manuscript based on past sales data.

The head of audio projects at Alpina Digital (Alpina group) Nikolai Boronin said that the company voiced 86 books from its portfolio using AI: “But it cannot be said that this has become a regular practice. Even a good artificial intelligence cannot fully replace the announcer. Such a voice is imperfect, which can negatively affect sales.” Picky listeners may avoid AI audiobooks due to the lack of natural intonation, he says.

Obviously, the technology is still imperfect: in order to reach truly large volumes and be responsible for the final quality, it is necessary to additionally mark up the text, adding stress to complex words, as well as helping AI to correctly intonate books, Mr. Selivanov explains. According to him, LitRes plans to improve the recording process in 2023: “Users are very sympathetic to voice acting by robots if they do not encounter problems with incorrect accents or intonations, so the active development of the book industry in this direction is obvious.”

Valeria Lebedeva