𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗴𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘁.
I almost chose an AI voice during the narrator auditions for The Marketing Movement™ audiobook.
I wasn’t looking for one, nor was I expecting an AI voice to be presented as a human audition. Clearly, people are testing boundaries and exploring just how far technology can go.
What bothers me is how easy it could have been to fall for this perfect voice audition sample. The pacing and tone were right. Everything sounded polished and professional, so in many ways it was perfect.
After a few days, the excitement wore off and I found myself returning to the sample with a growing sense of suspicion. I couldn’t explain it and there was no obvious reason to question it, and yet something felt off.
As humans, we carry emotion whether we intend to or not. Our voices reveal far more than the words themselves ever could. That’s what I eventually realised I was listening for. Machines, on the other hand, seem remarkably good at maintaining an ideal state. They can be consistently positive, consistently clear, and consistently polished, to the point that I’d call it soulless.
What makes a voice believable is it’s depth, quirks, and the subtle shifts in energy that are often the very things that tell you there is warmth and a real person behind the words.
Audiobook listeners deserve a voice they can trust, enjoy, and believe.
Eventually, I pushed for more information, and both my publisher and I discovered that the voice we were questioning was, in fact, AI-generated.
I wasn’t disappointed by the technology. Quite the opposite. I was impressed by how convincing it had become. But I’m so glad I listened to my gut.
Sometimes we follow our intuition long before we can explain it. The explanation arrives later, after we’ve trusted ourselves enough to keep asking questions, and that is human judgement in action.
The search for the right narrator ended up taking months. What I assumed would be a straightforward production step became an entirely separate project with its own process, challenges, and lessons.
In the end, I didn’t choose the AI voice, nor did I select any of the original audition voices.
Instead, I found a talented human narrator from within my own network and took a chance on someone whose voice felt right from the beginning.