It’s been a while since I last wrote and I apologize for that. I try to stay friendly, but sometimes life runs away with me.
Have you ever started work on a project and had just lost all track of time? Unable to look away?
If so, you’re my people. Because that’s what just happened to me.
Last time I wrote, I was sharing the fun I was having playing around with art generated by artificial intelligence. it’s been fun to type a few words and see beautiful images come back.
Well. I couldn’t stop myself. I kept playing around with AI. In some ways it’s been worse than social media for me! Once I go in, it’s hard to come out.
Well, here’s what I have to show for it.
Google has an AI Voices AudioBook generation service. I used it about a year ago to make audiobooks of one of my devotional books. It was fun to listen to all the different voices and hear how they read my words. Not too bad.
But I could only pick one voice to read the book (like a normal narrator).
But not any more. Google announced that they now support multi-voice audio books! So I had to play around with it.
I chose the book Jarial’s Last Chance. It turned out to be about a 45 minute read. Then I had a casting call for AI voices.
Google literally has 24 different English voices. So I made list of all the characters in the story and “auditioned” all of the voices. They were male and female, with accents from the US, England, Australia and India.
Sad to say, I didn’t have any roles for Indian voices. But I did use all the other nationalities. I hope you’ll forgive both Jesus and Lucifer being English. No commentary on the accents, I just needed the variety.
In all, I cast 11 different voices to read the book.
Then of course I had to generate a cover:
I used the same AI image generator that I shared last time (MidJourney) to generate this image. It’s supposed to be a picture of Jarial standing in the Heavenly Realms as she faces her great challenge.
Honestly, I love the depth of expression of her face. It really makes me stop and wonder what she’s thinking or looking at.
But it is AI generated art. If you look just past her right elbow, you’ll see a hand. AI art generators really struggle with hands. If you think for a moment, you’ll figure out that the hand is actually backwards on the arm. Yeah it’s an impossible anatomical configuration. But I liked the main character so much, I kept it and just tried to squeeze it over to the very edge.
Of course pointing it out to you didn’t really help my case.
Fair Warning: AI voices aren’t the same as humans narrating with feeling. But I think the story comes across quite nicely with all the voices “reading” it. 🙂
You can get the audiobook on Google play, if that’s where you normally go for audio books (most people don’t). Audible won’t accept audiobooks that don’t have a human narrator, so I’ve also put it up on my website.
I put this at a price far below most audio books, so you can have it for less than a cup of coffee. It will be a fun indulgence – and then you can tell your friends you’ve listened to “otherworldly voices” tell a story about angels.
If you get the book from me, it will go to my fulfillment service. They can definitely get ebooks on kindles and kobo readers. But for audiobooks, you have to download their free app. It works just like Audible and is super easy to use. Step by step instructions will be in the order confirmation email.
I would love to hear your thoughts about how natural the voices sound, and which one you think is cast the best (I felt like a real director trying to match them all up!).
You can get the book here:
https://www.dennis-stevenson.com/product/jarials-last-chance-audiobook/
I hope you enjoy. I went deep into this and had a blast playing around with all the tools.
Now it’s time to get back to the normal work…
Blessings,
Dennis
