Listening to audiobooks is in some way a throwback to our ancestral past when we would sit around the campfire listening to our elders tell stories of their own lives or the lives of those who came before them. It is ironic that futuristic technology now allows us to go back to our ancestral roots and perform that most primordial of all tasks - the art of listening.
Of course, the futuristic technology I'm referring to is AI - or Artificial Intelligence for those who've only recently stopped listening to vinyls. After pasting or typing a book's text into text-to-speech software, the AI voice generator then converts the text into speech. Depending on the software, there are options to adjust the reading speed and also choose from a range of natural voices.
A bad reading voice can absolutely trash a good book, and perhaps none of the AI conversions will ever be as good as the human voice, such as the recordings of Australian poetry and literature by my own favourite, Leonard Teale, an Australian radio announcer, presenter, narrator, and actor who was known for his baritone voice (you may still know him for his role as David "Mac" MacKay in the early Australian top-rating police drama "Homicide" which ran for 509 episodes- yes, I'm showing my age).
However, AI can create many more audiobooks and much faster and at much lower cost than any human voice, which is perhaps the reason why so many are now freely available on YouTube. My favourite is "neuralsurfer" who has an extensive playlist - click here, select an author and then scroll through the titles in the right-hand panel.
David Christopher Lane - to give him his full name - offers audiobooks of several of my favourite authors: Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Hemingway, H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson - I don't think there are enough days left to listen to them all while I lie on the old sofa on the sunny verandah and have myself read to sleep.
