Apple Shakes Up the Audiobook Industry
Author’s Note
2023 is off to a great start for Plainsight. This week, we announced our new partnership with MarineSitu aimed at propelling the evolving Blue Economy forward. With support from Plainsight, MarineSitu will boost and expand its efforts to develop cutting-edge monitoring tools for fields including marine energy. Check out our press release for more information on the ways Plainsight and MarineSitu are supporting sustainability and innovation across numerous Blue Economy industries.?
Plainsight News
The last few weeks of 2022 were eventful for our team as well.
AI News?
Is This the End of Traditional Audiobook Narration??
This week, Apple quietly unveiled a library of AI-narrated audiobooks available through its Books application. The move has the potential to fundamentally transform the way audiobooks are produced and upend a multi-billion dollar industry. Publishers, authors, and others have responded with skepticism. The Guardian , who first broke the news, quotes one Canadian literary agent as saying, “[Companies] want to make content. But that’s all it is. It’s not what customers want to listen to.”
The audiobook business is booming, generating more than $1.5 billion in 2022 and promising to bring in as much as $35 billion by the end of this decade. It's a market that has recently seen Apple, Spotify, and Amazon emerge as the primary combatants and take repeated shots at one another. According to reports, Apple had initially hoped to release its catalog of AI-read books back in November before layoffs at Meta and Twitter’s myriad woes began to dominate the tech newscycle.
Currently, Apple only offers AI-narrated books representing certain sub-genres of fiction. Romance, literary, historical, and “women’s fiction” are included in the inaugural class, but science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction enthusiasts will have to wait to hear how AI sounds reading their favorite types of books. The Verge notes that both AI voices, known as Jackson and Madison, possess “an unmistakably artificial edge that lacks the warmth of a human storyteller.”
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Microsoft Has High Hopes for ChatGPT and Bing
The rivalry between Bing and Google has never really been much of a rivalry. While the latter has become synonymous with internet search engines as a whole, the former has struggled to divert attention from the market leader. Microsoft is hopeful that more conversational, human-like answers could help its search engine begin to put up a fight. Reports suggest it could introduce new ChatGPT-powered Bing features by March.?
ChatGPT is just one of the exciting solutions unveiled by Open AI last year. DALL-E 2, an image generator, and Point-E, a 3D model generator, have both courted controversy and attracted months of headlines. Whatever is next for Microsoft, Open AI’s trio of generative solutions should continue to draw debate and discussion throughout 2023.?
NYC Schools Ban Generative Text Solutions
Since its introduction, ChatGPT has inspired at least as much controversy and concern as unbridled enthusiasm. For every social media user gleefully sharing their correspondence with the solution, there’s another wondering how they, their industry, or their profession can possibly keep up.
The academic community in particular has expressed its misgivings about how a generative text solution could make plagiarism and other types of cheating both easier to perpetrate and harder to detect. This week, The New York City Department of Education (which represents the largest public school system in the nation) announced its intention to ban ChatGPT on its devices and networks. A spokesperson for the Department cited “negative impacts on student learning and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of the content.” CNet notes that the move could be a sign of things to come , suggesting additional schools and school systems may follow suit.?
About the Author & Plainsight
Bennett Glace is a B2B technology content writer and cinephile from Philadelphia. He helps Plainsight in its mission to make vision AI success repeatable, scalable and traceable for enterprises across industries.
Plainsight provides the unique combination of AI strategy, a vision AI platform, and deep learning expertise to develop, implement, and oversee transformative computer vision solutions for enterprises. Through the widest breadth of managed services and a vision AI platform for centralized processes and standardized pipelines, Plainsight makes computer vision repeatable and accountable across all enterprise vision AI initiatives. Plainsight solves problems where others have failed and empowers businesses across industries to realize the full potential of their visual data with the lowest barriers to production, fastest value generation, and monitoring for long-term success. For more information, visit plainsight.ai .