I've been thinking a
lot about audiobooks nowadays since talking to a friend of mine who
is a postman. He listens to a lot, walking 4 hours a day which is the
perfect way to consume talking books. But he did something I wasn't
really aware of: he gets books via Google Books and sets their
speakbot up to tell the story to him. I know Kindle did this waaaay
back when they first launched, and my friend tells me that is how he
started doing it, but lawyers got involved and argued that it
contravines the talking book right in the contracts, when kindle had
only paid for ebook rights. Or something. I'm vague on the details.
So I tried it.
https://www.naturalreaders.com/
is a site with great voices which sound, well, natural. Ish. Just cut
and paste text and it will read it to you, in a variety of male,
female, British, American, French, German voices and more (all
hilariously nicknamed things like 'Bruce', 'Graham' and 'Audrey'). It
works. Mostly. I also got the app for my phone (which comes with free
auto-installed versions of Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes
Stories) and the extension for my web browser which can read my
emails to me.
But of course I am
behind the times in all this. The Amazon Echo will already speak to
you like your best (if slightly robotic) mate, and Google are hot on
their heels with what is now called a 'Digital Assistant'. So what
next? Well, the sky is the limit. How about an interactive story for
the Echo, one that you can choose where the story goes? Or you can
place yourself in the story and ask the characters questions? You can
be the detective in the murder mystery. With artificial intelligence
and natural sounding voices on the up, this should be possible very
soon. It just needs the right combination of writers and programmers
– thinking about it, it is essentially a text adventure like those
of the 1980s but read out loud by the computer.
By Peter Langston [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
But just as iPhones
surprised everyone with their ubiquitousness, and pushed the tablet
revolution onwards, maybe the next big thing is not voice activated?
Could it be Virtual Reality, gesture activated or linking directly to
your neurons? Will it take place not via a speaker or a screen, or
even a book, but centred in your own mind? The future is limitless.
++
Dan Metcalf is a writer
in SW England. His new book, Codebusters,
is out in July 2017.
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