Hello out there,
It’s been a while since we talked. Sure, I post new chapters every week but I haven’t been blogging.
I’ve been working with a new AI app recently and I wanted to share my findings. Normally, I would post this in my Narrative Driven Art blog but this has to do with the current book I’m writing so I figured this was probably a better spot for it.
ElevenLabs. This is the tool I’ve been using to create my audiobook. It’s probably the best-
sounding AI Voiced tool I’ve ever used. Here is the first chapter of my book as an example.
The Narrator sounds a bit monotone but that was a personal choice as my main character roleplays a zombie. As I learned to use the tool I’ve also learned to make them less monotone. In fact, as I re-listen to the first chapter I would have re-generated the lines from my latest chapter if they were read that way.
The best part about it is you can choose a voice for each character.
They have a section dedicated to projects like a book. It has an area for chapters, you choose a narrator, and you go line by line picking the best-voiced part. You don’t “have” to use a different character for each voice. You could have a single narrator but the problem with that is it doesn’t voice the other characters differently from the main character so it can be hard to determine who is talking.
Truthfully, I’ve had experience making AI voices sound more natural by messing with them when I was younger and those techniques have helped me in using this. I’ve been really impressed with this tool.
I paid $11 for a month of use and it gave me 140k tokens. The normal cost is $22. The value is pretty good because I got around 7 chapters fully voiced. Each of my chapters are only around 2000 words. I am very close to running out of credits. So it seems you can do about 14k words each month with the $22 plan.
There’s a $100 plan after that which gives you 640k tokens per month and a $330 plan that gives you 2 million tokens a month.
I could see myself doing this full-time. It allows for cussing as well. There are also some pretty gruesome scenes where zombies are eating humans in my book and it didn’t have any problems with the tool voiceing any of it.
As for my gripes about the Projects section. It doesn’t allow you to look at your previous voice generations. It deletes the ones you didn’t use. There is an overall lack of functionality that should be there but isn’t yet.
I’ve chosen voices for my characters from a default list and also chosen some from their library. I don’t know if the default voices are ever going to go away or change or not so I would like an option to add them to my voice lab.
Their voice lab is interesting but they don’t really tell you how it works. I’ve lost so many cool voices because I went to press the play button to play the voice again and it closes the voice lab window. I lose the voice forever which is really sad.
The whole business is VERY new so I understand there are going to be hiccups. Either way, I’m VERY impressed with ElevenLabs.
You can try it out for free on their website. I linked it just above the audio clip so give them a try. It’s worth playing around with at least.
So happy to talk with you all again,
Katherine
Author Katherine Phillips 