It’s clearly been a busy time for platforms locking themselves away in their sheds, because several of the biggest seem to have stumbled back into the daylight to show us what they’ve built. Today, I want to talk about two of them that are of particular interest to us—and I have a third saved for Thursday’s news.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Spotify Adds AI-Powered Audiobook Recaps
First comes another new audiobook feature from Spotify designed to improve the listening experience for subscribers. Recaps is a feature that switches on after someone has listened to 15–20 minutes of an audiobook. It does exactly what you would think: it gives listeners returning to pick up where they left off a recap of what happened in the first part of the story—just like a recap at the start of a TV episode.
How does it do this? The answer, of course, is AI. But Spotify has become very mindful of how creators respond to its use of AI and peppers its announcements with caveats:
“Recaps use AI technology to help you catch up, but the work of authors and narrators stays protected: We are not using audiobook content for LLM training purposes or voice generation, and Recaps do not replicate narration or replace the original audiobook in any way.”
If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s basically the audiobook equivalent of the Story So Far feature that Amazon introduced for e-books about (if I recall correctly) a year ago.
ElevenLabs Partners with Celebrities for AI Voices
Next comes ElevenLabs, the AI-generated voice specialists, who have started making deals with celebrities to create AI-generated versions of their voices. Starting with Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine, it marks a step away from the antagonism between actors and AI that reached its most heated point when Scarlett Johansson went full-on Avenger with OpenAI over allegations they had stolen her voice.
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