Bookwire partners with Google to offer customers auto-narrated audiobook technology 

Digital publishing company Bookwire has partnered with Google Play Books to allow customers to produce auto-narrated audiobooks using its text-to-speech technology.

Using Google’s technology, Bookwire customers will be able to create auto-narrated audiobooks within the framework of Bookwire’s WAY audiobook service, which will “complete production and quality assurance of these audiobooks”.

Both the production request and the subsequent delivery of the ready-for-distribution auto-narrated audiobooks will be handled by Bookwire operating software. Google Play Books has launched auto-narrated audiobook production for English, Spanish, German, French and Brazilian Portuguese books.

Solveij Krause, team lead for business development audio at Bookwire, said: "We are happy that in co-operation with the leading technology company Google we can add another provider to our text-to-speech service who offers audiobook production with advanced AI in multiple languages. Bookwire wants to give publishers even more diverse opportunities to participate in the growing audio market with the additional TTS [text-to-speech] offer."

Bookwire said the production of audiobooks with AI was not intended as a replacement for professional studios and human speakers but as an addition to Bookwire’s audiobook production offering.

“Publishers can freely choose with WAY whether their audiobook should be produced with a human speaker or an artificial voice,” Bookwire explained. "In terms of accessibility and backlist, text-to-speech offers a rapid and cost-effective way for publishers to tap the full potential of their catalogues and make their titles available for everyone.”

Apple Books recently launched a new suite of auto-narrated audiobooks. Google Play Books rolled out its auto-narrated audiobooks technology last year and while it was broadly welcomed by publishers, who said it presented real opportunities for accessibility, there was scepticism about the quality of auto-narrated content. Author and journalist Mark Piesing recently wrote a column for The Bookseller saying AI narration was “inevitable”.