HarperCollins UK partners with AI company on audiobooks

Tuesday, 23 April 2024 Books+Publishing

HarperCollins UK has announced a partnership with US-based audio AI company ElevenLabs to create audiobooks for its non-English language business, reports the Bookseller.

Under the partnership, ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech technology will be used to create audio versions of select ‘deep backlist’ series books. According to ElevenLabs, its AI-based tool makes it possible to ‘reflect the emotion, intonation, and pacing of the written word in audio, delivering a high-quality experience that sounds human’.

ElevenLabs was founded in 2002 by ex-Google machine learning engineer Piotr Dabkowski and former Palantir strategist Mati Staniszewski. The company said its Projects tool, designed for publishers and independent authors, can create an audiobook in around one hour, with creators able to ‘select or design the voices they want to use, easily assign specific text fragments to particular speakers, and adjust pause lengths between text segments’.

HarperCollins said it will ‘continue to devote time and resources to voice actor-led productions, which are intrinsic to its current audiobook creation strategy’. ‘Text to speech will be leveraged as a complementary tool to enable a broader number of audiobooks for backlist series books in non-English markets, leading to a more diverse selection of titles in the format and driving growth in the audiobook markets,’ the publisher said.

Category: International news