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.