Nice!
As an aside, while this tool can be used to create an audiobook from a book you have in text format, for your private consumption, having an author employ something like this to create files for distribution is extremely risky, even if they acknowledge its use and intend those files to only be available on their website.
Indie authors struggle a lot to promote their works, and the new normal is that potential readers, the polite ones[^1], use the slightest hint of AI usage to discard their title and move on...as they are entitled to, since there are so many books.
I in particular have started to hire voice actors that have good acting skills and good diction but for whom English is their second language, or it's their first language but they speak something else at home; sometimes I even ask them to go a notch up with their accents. It helps with the non-AI recognition, and it also increases the appeal of the book for people who would like to try out something new. Once, I did an audition for a project and was pleasantly surprised with how much life people from around the Mediterranean basin were able to inject into their renderings, compared with people from Britain and North America.
[^1] Impolite readers set the town on fire, and then go about and spread that fire to neighboring towns, for good measure.
> and the new normal is that potential readers, the polite ones[^1], use the slightest hint of AI usage to discard their title and move on...
Is that the new normal?
My impression is that when it comes to reading text, nobody cares as long as the final product is good.
People don't want AI-written books, but people have been comfortably listening to AI voices reading text for a long time now. Text-to-speech isn't really a controversial thing for listening to articles or books.
(Which is very different from voice acting, for example, which requires acting not just reading.)
I am big time user of Amazon’s WhisperSync feature. With that feature I can simultaneously read the book and listen to it.
This is especially helpful when you’re on the go but still want to have a visual now and then or highlight text for later.
The problem is that many books don’t offer that feature. There is a built-in read function now in the kindle app, but it’s crap.
So, if you ask me, I’d prefer a good human-written book with an additional AI voice on top to enable that feature for me.