What is auto-narration of audiobooks and how can it benefit authors and rights-holders as well as listeners? What are some of the common objections to auto-narration and how can we keep a positive attitude to embracing change? Ryan Dingler from Google Play Books goes into detail on these questions and more. You can also listen to my recent round-up of AI narration options across multiple platforms in episode 623. Ryan Dingler is a product manager at Google and also writes about the intersection of technology and business. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes * What is auto-narration? Who can use it and what languages and accents are available? * Tackling common objections to auto-narration — “the voices aren't good enough;” and narration should be “kept for humans” * Stratification of audio rights and how both human and AI narration fit into the audio ecosystem * Multi-cast audiobooks * The potential for growth in non-English-speaking markets * Pricing an AI narrated audiobook * How will the market change in the coming year? You can find Google Play Books at play.google.com/store/books and you can publish at Play.google.com/books/publish/u/0/ g.co/play/autonarrated – Publisher website for auto-narrated audiobooks g.co/play/narrator-library – Narrator library g.co/play/autonarrated-help – Help center Transcript of Interview with Ryan Dingler Joanna: Ryan Dingler is a product manager at Google and also writes about the intersection of technology and business. Welcome back to the show, Ryan. Ryan: Thanks for having me on. Joanna: It's good to talk to you again. You were on the show in April 2021, talking about publishing on Google Play Books in general. And we just mentioned auto-narration for audio, which was in beta at the time, but we're going to go into that in detail today. What is auto-narration for audiobooks? Give us an update on where the program is now. Ryan: We've come a long way since I last spoke with you both in terms of the beta and in terms of what we've done with the product. But just to start off, what are auto-narrated audiobooks, it's very simply, instead of being read by a person, auto-narrated audiobooks are read using Google's text-to-speech technology.