A Chinese search engine is making AI technology lookalikes that can read popular novels in the voices of the authors. The company, Sogou created the avatar called Yanny which would have the ability to read books. Sogou has launched two AI newsreaders in 2018 currently being used by the Chinese news agency presently.

The Chinese market for audiobooks is gradually increasing in recent times. The market will also experience more increase by next year. The technology makes it even easier to use text-to-speech to generate an audio version of books using synthetic voices.

A lot of people will likely prefer already made professionally narrated audiobooks instead of an AI generated one. However, the advances in machine learning would mean that the digitised voices would sound more lifelike. In fact, the voice that reads the book could even sound like the author or a famous personality.

Another company, Lyrebird, says it lets clients create customised vocal avatars from 60-second voice recordings. The website says:

“Users that have created their vocal avatar can give you their consent to use their voice in your application. This product is particularly suitable if you are building custom user avatars or you want your users to be able to choose their own artificial voice in your applications.”

There are two audio recordings on the Lyrebird website homepage. One is of former US President Barack Obama and the other is of current US President Donald Trump. They created their voices using machine learning.

Also, UK based start-up DeepZen has a synthetic speech technology that can create several versions of an audiobook in only a few hours.