Audible, in their Amazon wisdom, have decided to pollute all audiobook results with dozens if not hundreds or thousands of AI voice readings. Audible calls their AI read books Virtual Voice. Listeners are frustrated.
I was searching the Plus catalogue and frustrated that although there are 4,000 possibilities, you can’t look at more than 500. So I decided to sort from old to new and then new to old and found that page after page of the newer audiobooks were virtual voice. NO THANK YOU AUDIBLE. While some phrases have the appropriate emotion, many do not. I’m going to search out what I might want out of the Plus catalogue and then I’m done with Audible.
For now, there’s a huge difference in reading quality between a human reader, who understands the text, and a virtual voice which is just attempting to pronounce the words correctly. AI voices can approximate a simple emotion through intonation. The emotions on offer are something like conspiratorial, indignant, calming, sexy. If you want to lose your mind sometime, try Grok’s Eve voice in Unhinged mode. There’s lots of intonation there but it’s a bit monotone.
Of course many human readers don’t deeply understand what they are reading. In that case their performance won’t be much better than an AI voice, perhaps worse, as like computers what AI does have going for it is consistency and persistence. AI can keep working in the identical way, day and night for weeks on end, without asking for a night off or even a decent lunch.
Still, as a human, I only want to hear readings from other humans. I will use AI voices on occasion to read me texts for which I can’t find a human-read version. But I certainly wouldn’t want to buy machine readings.
Some listeners have made AI voices a political issue. On principle, they don’t want to leave voice actors without work. SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) have issued a no work, no license order.
Given the emergence of AI audiobook companies, the broad concerns around the use of digital voices in audiobooks, and the importance of having union protections in this arena, with the unanimous support of the SAG-AFTRA Audiobook Steering Committee, the Executive Committee of the National Board has voted to issue a “No Contract, No Work” order against companies seeking to create, and license or use digital voice replicas for audiobooks.
What SAF-AFTRA wants is not a total ban but a fair compensation agreement. What companies like Audible want is a royalty-free agreement with voice actors where the company pays the artist a single flat fee for an unlimited license (both timme and territory). Effectively voice actors are trading a lifetime of work for a single small paycheque.
In the meantime what Audible has done which is incredibly buyer-unfriendly, is to remove any GUI interface to remove their VirtualVoice books. Most of these books are produced by another Amazon company, ACX. The Virtual Voice books are almost pure profit for Audible/Amazon, with very small royalty fees.
There is a way to filter out Virtual Voice books though. Adding this filter to the end of any search will do it:
&narrator=-virtualThere have been brave attempts to make a GreaseMonkey script to add a GUI checkbox to include or exclude Virtual Voice books but as of today 3 October 2025 on Audible.com, the script does not work.
What I’ve done is add a “novv” shortcut to my text expander (Typinator or TypeIt4Me on macOS, TypeIt4Me is less expensive and doesn’t suffer from outrageous renewal fees, both work fine). I just type n o v v into any Audible search polluted with Virtual Voice results and presto, the AI voice read books are gone.
In defence of Audible, at one point AI read books did not have to be marked as such. I ended up purchasing a an H.P. Lovecraft Collection which was all AI voices (2020 vintage AI voices, awful). Audible did have the good manners to take it back for a credit six months later when I got around to attempting to listen to one of the books.
Audible should really offer a checkbox or even a global preference to exclude machine-read audiobooks from all results.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
Leave a Reply