The Apple Books Store now sells audiobooks read aloud by AI-synthesized voices.

Depending on your point of view, this is either a huge boon for indie authors, who could never afford to pay for a full-scale audiobook production, or yet another tale of artificial intelligence (AI) taking the jobs of human artists. But the real story is more complicated, involving plot twists like accessibility, Apple’s strange decisions about who gets to use the service, and whether it will make much of a difference at all.

"The upside of this, of course, is that it's not just a huge win for those who prefer audiobooks, but also for accessibility. There are millions of titles that are not available to people with disabilities, making it difficult or impossible for them to read e-books or print books," writes author and journalist Dan Moren on his Six Colors blog. "The addition of easily produced audio versions could create a wealth of content."

Before we get to the implications, how good are these voices, anyway? It’s one thing to create a voice that can read out answers to a voice assistant like Siri, and quite another to come up with a voice that doesn’t drive you crazy after five minutes. A good audiobook narrator brings the story and the characters to life, but above all, they need to get out of the way. If their grandeur distracts from the story or becomes annoying, they’ve failed.