You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Sounded.com to produce audiobooks for Bennion Kearny using digital replicas of real voice artists
Online audiobook producer Sounded.com has signed a deal with publisher Bennion Kearny to produce a minimum of 10 audiobooks.
The deal, negotiated post-Frankfurt Book Fair, was brokered by James Lumsden-Cook at Bennion Kearny and Jason Kelly at Sounded. It will see 10 of the publisher’s well-performing titles produced as audiobooks by Sounded.com and distributed exclusively by Sounded.com, including through its own mobile apps.
The deal is also the first commercial production using Sounded’s proprietary TrueVoice™ service, which uses digital replicas of real voice artists, which have been created under licence by Sounded.com and used with the consent of the voice artist. Sounded said the voice artist has oversight of the project and receives a fee on each occasion of use.
Bennion Kearny is an international publishing company based in the UK. It says it is “pioneering the use of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to help create new opportunities for the writing and development of commercial titles”.
The first five titles in the deal with Bennion Kearny will be narrated using a TrueVoice™ digital replica of audiobook narrator Gill Mills. The titles include How to Have a Baby and Not Lose your S**t by Kirsty Smith; Bryan Adams: A Fretted Biography of the First Six Albums by Mark Duffett; and The Secret Magistrate with a foreword by Malcolm Robertson OBE, with more titles to come.
Lumsden-Cook said: “Listening to the quality of Gill Mills’ TrueVoice™ was impressive when comparing it to traditional voices in the text-to-speech market. It’s like chalk and cheese.” He added: “The Sounded team have been great to work with since our first meeting at the Frankfurt Book Fair. With many more titles available, we see this as a longer-term relationship in bringing our content to a wider audience in audiobook format.”
Mills said: “The Sounded TrueVoice™ programme is a real game changer. It gives me complete control over where my voice replica is used and offers flexible pricing models.”
Kelly also commented: “I’m delighted Bennion Kearny has chosen Sounded.com and TrueVoice™ for narrating their audiobooks, and we look forward to bringing these great titles to market very soon, with hopefully many more to come.”
The move is the latest in using synthetic speech technology. In November Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) said it will test virtual voice-narrated audiobooks in the US. Earlier this year digital publishing company Bookwire partnered with Google Play Books to allow customers to produce auto-narrated audiobooks using its text-to-speech technology. Apple also soft launched a raft of audiobooks narrated by Artificial Intelligence on its Apple Books platform in January.
