Amazon’s Audible audiobook service is partnering with select publishers to bring more print and e-books into the spoken word realm and is leveraging AI narration and translation to help it happen at scale. This move aims to quickly boost Audible’s product offerings so it can compete more effectively against streamers like Apple and Spotify who have rapidly expanded their literary market share. “Audiobooks are the fastest-growing format in publishing,” yet of the millions of titles available today in print and as e-books, only 2-5 percent exist in audio form, according to the company.

“Audible is working with U.S.-based book publishers to convert print and e-books into artificial intelligence-voiced audiobooks, helping to expand its catalog particularly in non-English speaking markets,” Bloomberg writes, adding that “publishers can select from more than 100 AI-generated voices across English, Spanish, French and Italian, including numerous accent and dialect options.”

Audible explains in a newsroom post that it is using its own “fully integrated, end-to-end AI production technology” that combines Audible’s 30 years of experience producing audiobooks with AI tech from Amazon.

In December, Amazon launched its own Nova family of generative models and is testing AI dubbing for Prime Video.

“For publishers wanting to be hands-off, an end-to-end service managed by Audible handles the ‘entire audiobook production process’ right up to publication, while a self-service option will give publishers access to the same tools so they can independently direct the entire production process,” The Verge reports.

Audible will also offer two translation pathways: text-to-text translation for manuscripts (after which publishers can select either professional or AI narration), and speech-to-speech translation that preserves original narrators’ voice and style across languages, the company says, adding that its audiobook experts “will help guide publishers to identify ideal titles from their catalogs, creating new opportunities to connect stories with listeners worldwide.”

Amazon, which began as an online book seller, has been aggressive in bringing new technology to publishing. In 2023 it launched a virtual voice tool in beta for self-published U.S. authors, and last year it rolled out model training for audiobook narrators so they could create “voice clones.”

And Amazon isn’t the only one applying AI to books. Spotify in February announced is working with ElevenLabs for AI narration.