Recently I was told that I had a nice voice for an audiobook. Other than inflating my ego, it gave me the idea to narrate an audiobook using AI.
I’m a narcissist.
But it is a good idea for people who want to record an AI audiobook narration for loved ones or friends. But that really sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?
It would take hours and hours to record the lines and then edit everything. It makes you not even want to imagine the time and effort it must take audiobook creators.
I offer an easy alternative that would be an insignificant fraction of that time and effort.
It is called voice cloning. Voice cloning is a complicated process, but with Typecast it’s made easy, though you’ll need a paid plan to access this tool.
Voice cloning
Go to the Voice Cloning tool on Typecast.
You’ll wanna hit Try Now on the orange banner labeled Your very own, high-quality voice clone, and from there pick a slot and get to work.
If you don’t already have an audio file of your own voice, which is most likely, I would suggest reading aloud different lines with varying tones and making sure to add questions for about 10 minutes.
Once you’re done recording, just upload the file and it should take around an hour or two to be finished.
Typecast will send an email once the voice cloning is done and you can start the audiobook-making process.
Now, you won’t have enough space to put the text into the dialogue box in the Voice Cloning section, so hop on over to Text-to-Speech.
Input the text by copying and pasting (or if you really wish typing each word) a chapter at a time to download the different sections.
You can break up the lines to add pauses if you wish, but it’s usually best read with breaks between the paragraphs.
Most likely you will not have the credits to complete the AI audiobook narration, so either it will have to be a project you need to finish downloading the next month (and the next, and the next) depending on how many hours your audiobook is or you can purchase the credits.
Which books to narrate
This might just be the hardest part of the whole operation. That is, choosing which books to narrate. There’s a selection of books including the ones worth reading on BookTok.
But if none of those books sound quite right, here are some ideas to narrate and I’ll link the Goodreads entry.
For children:
- Fablehaven by Brandon Mull
- The Wishing Spell (Land of Stories) by Chris Colfer
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia) by C.S. Lewis
- The Fairy-Tale Detectives (The Sisters Grimm) by Michael Buckley
- Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Berry
- Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
- Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
- Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
- Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson
For adults:
- A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King) by T.H. White
- Mistborn: The Final Empire (The Mistborn Saga) by Brandon Sanderson
- The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh
- The Selection by Kiera Cass
- Cinder by Marissa Meyer
- The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon) by Dan Brown
