Blog 4 Are Voice Narrators Going to Be Replaced by Artificial Intellingence?

Blog 4: Artifical Intelligence? I Ain't Afraid of No Bots! (Should I Be?) October 31, 2025--Yes, I wrote this blog on Halloween, really! Is my future as scary as the holiday???

"You do voice narrations. Aren't you afraid AI will take your job?"
"Nope."

Every now and then, someone asks me since I am a voice narrator (and a post-production mixer of voice and music), if I'm afraid AI is going to make what I do obsolete.

In the world of voice narrations, we have all heard an AI voice on Youtube or radio commercials that sound well, not bad. They still sound robotic, but it is a human voice. ‘Won’t the day come”, as my friend recently asked me, “when someone will just feed in a script, have the AI read it, and a natural-sounding voice will read it?

"Yes"

"Well, then, voice narrators will be obsolete.”

"Well, no"

Let me explain:

First, let's take an example from the current marketplace: Let’s say in a given book genre--mystery novels, for an example--10,000 written books are published in a six month period. Ten percent of them will be turned into audio books. That’s 1,000 audiobooks. As a voice narrator, I would look at that market of 10,000 books and say my goal would be to narrate, says .1% (one tenth of one percent) of that batch of 10,000 books. That would be 10 books, and that would keep me busy for a while.

But now let's peer three years in the future: AI comes along, and it can take 10,000 written books and turn scores of them into audiobooks in a matter of minutes. Let's forget that those books will still likely need to be proofed by someone for pronunciation errors, unnatural inflections, and the like, which will still require human editing and retakes, but by all means, the production of audio books much be much faster. As the rate of production comes down, so, of course, will the price per book--probably way down.

But here is the point many analsysts miss: As audio production becomes cheaper, the percentage of written books that will be turned into an audio book will go way up. It's already happening.

I'm one of the millions of Americans who would rather listen to the book however than read it. This is a lifestyle choice. I walk several miles every other day, and audiobooks are the perfecct companion. I'm not alone in my preference for audiobooks as the percentage of U.S. adults who listen to audiobooks has grown by over 100% in the last 10 years. That one hundred times more people listen to audiobooks in 2025 than did in 2015, and the rate increase is prediccted to continue. Frankly I think the rate increases are underestimated as my research show me they are based largely on lifestyle, and they fail to account for this future-ease-of-production phenomenon I've discussed above. And they don't take into account how audiobooks will be available in emerging economies around the world where they have yet to catch on.

If we are looking three to five years in the future, let's keep our imagination long term too: Now, because of the affordability of audiobook production, not 10% but say, maybe 70% of all written books will be narrated. . Now, instead of the market turning a batch of 10,000 written books into 1,000 audio books, it will be turning them into 7000 audiobooks. (10,000 written books x 70% instead of 10%)

So now my argument tells me in three to five years I'll have 7000 mystery novels to offer my voice narration services for, not 1000.

“Okay, Kevin, but someone will still want to pay a comptuer to “narrate” all those extra books, not a human who takes much longer and has to charge more for their time.”

Here's where it gets interesting. In today’s current market and likely for the next several years, AI can indeed produce audio narrations at an eye watering speed, but it can’t convey human emotion very well. Trust me on this one: Clients pay audo narrators like me me because they can hear the difference, and so can you.

So here's what's at the heart of why I'm not worried. There are two kinds of audiobooks: factual reads (think manuals, scientific literature, academic journals) and human reads (think mystery novels, poetry, plays, dialogue exchanges, thrillers, science fiction, biographies--in fact, most of the genres that are currently popular in audiobook formats. For voice narrators like me who express human emotion very well, human voice narrators will still be in demand, and, now, we will have more work since the marketplace will be supporting, as explained above, a much higher percentage of audiobooks than ever before.

So here’s my point: If you want to have a technical journal narrated, say, an abstract of peer-reviewed statistical data, AI can probably do the job about as well as a human (except for the proofing and editing for vocal errors). But I don't care! Without realizing it, I guess that’s why I do TV commercials, fictional novels, guided meditations, etc. I like to think I have a gift for conveying human emotions. And those types of voice narrations as we’ve seen will be in even greater demand as the technology makes audio books ever more popular. I'm willing to bet an author who has taken her time to write that romance novel she wants to share with the world, she won't want it to be narrated by a robot. Most writers of human-emotion literature will make that same choice that they do today. And more of them will want audiobook version of their work as the popularity continues to skyrocket

“Okay, Kevin, very clever, but you are underestimating how fast this AI technology advances. In three or five years years from now, AI will probably be able to convey human emotions in an audio format on any subject matter as well as a real person will be able to. Or very close."

Maybe. But there is another phenomenon in this market we haven't talked about yet: the commercial rights to one's own voice. Here’s where being a voice narrator gets to be even more of a “good job to have” not less of a one.

So let's peer farther into the future, say, seven to 10 years. Let’s say you just wrote a book, and you get it published in writing. Let's say the book is about a man who struggled through the depression to make himself a self-made success in life. You need a voice narrator who can express the joys, sorrows, humor, and pain of his journey. Now, AI, my "competitor", has now given me the ability to use my voice to narrate a book by simply applying my voice to the book. I can now, using my own voice, create a narraion of the book as fast as AI can.

So let’s look at this brave, new market: The number of audiobooks in the marketplace with be exponentially higher than we can imagine as their price and time of production comes way down. The voice narrator gets compensated each time his or her voice is used. If it is used, say, 50 times a month, that is 50 voice narrated audiobooks, for maybe 10 minutes of work. The marketplace, as it always does, will decide the value of each of those sales. Why is that a scary thought? The main difference is the narrator will not have potential 10,000 books to get a chance to narrate but a potential of hundreds of thouasand of books from humans all over the world connected together by technology. The narrator’s voice could be used to in one hour a) a bank commercial in Vietnamese, b) a love poem from a love sick man in Chad, c) a user manual for self-operating chicken coops in Poland. d) a political dissident’s autobiography in Hindi.

AI may have broken the language barrier, but humans will use it to compete against AI itself.

I’m not scared at all by such a brave new world. I think the real challenge will come from all the additional leisure time we're going to have on our hands to figure out how to get along with each other, how to love more and hate less in everyday life. And, for sure, we have the duty to make sure we use the power of AI to create a better world for everyone by making ethical choices with it. Given how we behave to each other already, those are the real challenges that scare me.