At PARIX IA 2026, held in Madrid on 18 March 2026, Andrea Llop of Digital Booster and Juliana Rueda, founder of Miut and MiVoz, discuss artificial and replicated voices in audiobook production. Moderated by Luis González, the session addresses publishers’ fears concerning reputation, credibility, opposition from authors and agents, and the possibility that reduced production costs could also diminish narrative quality and variety.
Both speakers favour replicated voices created from consenting professional narrators over anonymous synthetic voices. Urano World has established its own voice agency and compensates participating professionals, while MiVoz works with experienced audiobook actors whose voices are already recognised by listeners. Human narration remains preferable for major releases and emotionally complex fiction, whereas replicated voices can make nonfiction, backlist titles and simpler narratives economically viable in audio.
The technology can reduce production costs by approximately 40–60% and shorten production from more than a month to around ten working days. Automated tools can also accelerate quality control by locating errors directly. However, the speakers warn that savings must not eliminate essential preproduction, revision and final proofing. Texts still require careful preparation to manage pronunciation, numbers, pauses and prosody, while pacing, breathing and emotional inflection often demand human supervision.
Ethical production requires the narrator’s informed consent, robust contracts, compensation for every use of a replicated voice and clear limits on permitted works. Publishers must also ensure that protected recordings and manuscripts are not used to train external models. Looking ahead, replicated voices could support multilingual podcasts, international distribution and interactive audiobooks that allow listeners to converse with narrators or characters. Human and artificial narration are therefore expected to coexist rather than replace one another.
English title: Artificial Voices and Listening
