Book publishers are set to use artificial intelligence to bring dead authors back to life to narrate their own audiobooks, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Agatha Christie voicing Miss Marple, JRR Tolkien narrating The Lord Of The Rings, and Winston Churchill reading his history of the Second World War are on the cards in the technological revolution.
Industry executives are working with the literary estates of deceased authors to use archive audio tapes, such as radio interviews, to sample their voices.
Artificial-intelligence software will listen through the hours of clips and learn to mimic the authors’ voices before it sets about reading aloud published works.
Jon Watt, chairman of the Audio Publishers Group, has revealed how literary estates are investigating how best to harness AI for a major development in audiobooks.
Mr Watt told The Bookseller magazine’s FutureBook conference: ‘AI voices can be generated from licensed samples for a specific human voice, working with a deceased author’s estate to create an authorised voice replica – that is, with the authorised consent of the estate, based on archive recordings of the author’s voice.’
HarperCollins, publisher of the works of Christie, who died in 1976, is said to be keen to explore the prospect of using an AI version of the author’s voice to narrate her books, including the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novels.
The bestselling novelist left 13 hours of audio recordings of her speaking, including dictations she used to write her autobiography, which are seen as ideal for AI use.
AI could also sample tapes of Tolkien discussing The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit at length in a BBC radio interview in 1965, eight years before his death, while Churchill’s wartime recordings could be used to enable the statesman’s ‘voice’ to read his vast literary back catalogue.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1953.
Amanda D’Acierno, the global president of the audio division of Penguin Random House, the world’s largest publisher, said at the conference that it would be ‘almost negligent’ not to experiment with AI.
But she said ‘nothing would ever be done’ without the consent and support of authors’ representatives.
It was revealed last month that AI will be used to recreate the voice of the late chat-show host Sir Michael Parkinson for a new podcast series.
Virtually Parkinson has been produced with the backing of Sir Michael’s family.