AI Audiobook

I’ve been doing experiments with AI for a while now. I’ve done numerous meetups and sessions online about how AI can be a useful tool for writers. If you’re interested in learning more about ChatGPT, Canva, OpenAI, Quillbot and more join me in my other sessions. I am picking up on this discussion to talk about something really useful for you as an author. 

If you’ve been with me on one of my coaching sessions you’ll know exactly how to publish and go bestseller on Amazon. What you might not know is how you can use an AI tool from Amazon to set up audio for your book. 

It’s pretty magical to go from here to audio that can stream to someone who has never been to the Himalayas, or who has thought that their dreams were lost forever.

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AI is not something that replaces the writing, it is really an enabler – we need to harness how to use it well.

How To Use AI to Create an Audiobook

 

It is the first step in my six steps to relaunch a book.

Because this is an experiment where I’m using AI voices from Amazon

More specifically, Amazon Polly. Polly is a cloud service that converts text into lifelike speech. As an author, it’s quick and easy for you to convert the text for your book into audio. 

Amazon Polly also supports multiple languages and uses a variety of realistic voices that can be adjusted to suit your audience. 

This is the quickest, and cheapest way to convert an existing book to an audio format. Fiction and business books do really well as audiobooks, travel books not so well – after all, if you are travelling wouldn’t you like to see the information?

Before you start you need your book content available to cut and paste – Generate the latest version of the book as an .rtf file. I would have preferred a text file, but that isn’t possible from the application I use to format my books.

 

Create and Audiobook for nearly free with AI for free

A Step By Step Guide to Create an audiobook for free Using Amazon AI

  1. Set up an AWS account with Amazon, with an S3 tier. Set up a bucket for your audio files.
  2. Select Amazon Polly the AI audio application from Amazon.
    Select the voice you prefer, in a variety of languages – in English alone there are US, British, Australian and Indian. I recorded all four and asked my launch team which one they preferred.
  3. Start recording by cutting and pasting into the Text to Speech box.
    Click Listen to listen back to uptown 3000 characters. Test this a few times.
    Use SSML switch to add some codes to indicate which words are Spanish, for example, or to add a longer break between sentences. Download to the S3 tier. If there are errors, fix them.
  4. Download from S3 to your drive.
    You can listen to it here, and maybe repeat from step 2 if you aren’t happy.
    Rename the file to a sensible name.
  5. Create your blog post/social media post, and link to the file on S3 or platform, such as Adilo.
  6. Set up a podcast, or streaming service, such as Anchor, or soundcloud. Or create a page with the files as a bonus for your readers.

Your audio is now live! You have your book in audio content.

I followed the same process to create an audio out of my book Chasing Himalayan dreams.

Here’s a clip from when I joined Holly Warton’s podcast Into The Woods to talk about my book Chasing Himalayan Dreams.

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