Although sales of audiobooks in 2020 topped $1.3 billion, an increase of 13% over 2019, the ‘manufacturing’ process remains onerous. With “brand-name talent” getting paid over $1,000 per finished hour (PFH) of the audiobook, and the typical two-hour session in the studio only garnering one finished hour, the costs – alongside the timeline – swiftly lengthens. In come the plethora of digital voice technologies covered in this article, each pining after the ‘holy grail’ : “mak[ing] their voices indistinguishable from human voices”. Read full article here
