There is a fast growing market for audiobooks, according to publishers speaking at Radio Days Europe 25.

Ruth de Jager from Storytel and Ashu Behl from the Netflix style audio platform series publisher Pocket FM described how their audiobook platforms have used AI tools to enhance their publishing process.

Storytel

“What can we do to bring to life an AI created story and publishing?” said Ruth de Jager. The story New Horizon was a learning case to see if producers could use AI to make audio distribution bigger. “By creating an audio story exploring human and AI interaction in story telling we hoped to build team knowledge and receive feedback from our subscribers.”

The anthology about love and connection in an AI world targets an audience of female, 18-35 year olds, in English first then was translated into more languages.

The production team included writers working collaboratively from across Europe as well as marketing, communication, legal, tech, audio production team, translation, narration and music.

The team began by creating an author profile for Rosie Lett, an anagram for Storytel. Next was the setting for new horizon city which would be the central thread through out all the stories. A futuristic city with sleek architecture, towering skyscrapers where nature and tech blend seamlessly.

“We found it impossible to create a captivating plot for one 10 hour story due to AI hallucinations. We then changed to shorter stories.”

The story arc is that people are all connected for better, for worse. One book to be produced with 5 stories, 2 hours total.

• Prologue    Horizon city
• Chapter 1    AVA
• Chapter 2    Seranade
• Chapter 3    Timeless
• Aftermath    Reunion

“We found the AI tools useful for brainstorming and characterisation, but not original story lines,” said de Jager, explaining what they learnt.

An example of characterisation is the heroine Riley, a 22 years old coder, having experienced love and loss. She’s a hard worker and confides in their loyal partner AVA.

Digital voices didn’t work for the audience for the full duration of the anthology. “We did find that we could use Voice Switcher which used 2-3 hors of our Storytel employees voices.”

AI was useful for creating a book trailer for promotional purposes and tracking subscriber feedback. English speaking audience rated the book more highly than our Scandinavian audience.

The suite of tools used are listed below:

The take aways from the session were many:

• Humans are essential
• AI is inconsistent
• It tends to go Sci fi, soapy, traditional using Hallmark language
• Short form is better at this point
• Generic and overdoing
• Good for structure and planning, not so much for remembering plots and innovation
• Learning how to prompt is key
• Finding the right tools and combining the tools
• Tech help needed
• Safety/ Eye for IP
• Tools change every week, developments are going at light speed
• Fun, sparking creativity and cross functional team building

Pocket FM

“We decided to build a new audio long form entertainment category,” said Ashu. “The audio series will emerge as a key medium for writers to share their stories with a larger audience.”  They are using the Netflix model to produce audio series of local content at a much lower cost than video.

The stories are all written with the same elements applied to a variety of genres including drama, thriller, romance, sci-fi, fantasy and more:

• escapism with privacy
• low cognitive load
• affection with characters
• minimal decision making
• rooting for the underdog
• unpredictable cliffhangers
• high drama kick off
• unresolved situations

Pocket FM uses AI for series commissioning, creation and production. The AI blockbuster engine predicts which shows will be most engaging. The show pilot is created using AI, while the user traction is measured on social media to determine the top performing shows.

If a show is flagged with the potential to become a blockbuster, more human effort is put into the production process. In house contracted writers are commissioned to create scripted dialogue and drama based content using AI voice and adaption tools. While AI led recommendations deliver personalised content recommendations to the listeners.

AI Atlas is one of the tools used to adapt series content to other countries and cultures. The use of AI tools has increased productivity 4 fold so writers are now producing 40 hours of shows per month. This output has generated over $3 million in revenue in the the last 6 months of  English content translated for the German market.

The plan for the future is to continue expanding market and the content catalogue in more European languages.