Bookmate has introduced a feature that allows you to listen to books that do not have pre-recorded audio versions in real time. It is currently available for 13,000 works.
The virtual narrator was created for reading books aloud: it is developed on the basis of a complex of Yandex technologies that are used in the virtual assistant Alice, translation in Yandex Browser and other products, with the participation of professional speakers. Text playback is as close as possible to natural speech: the neural network is trained with long texts containing many narrations and descriptions. During the training process, the team corrects incorrect accents and other inaccuracies.
Already 80% of Bookmate users have chosen the audio format at least once to familiarize themselves with literature, and more than 20% have already discovered the advantages of combining formats. For publishers, a virtual narrator will allow them to make their books even more accessible to readers and also decide whether to voice the book based on demand data.
Previously, Bookmate published Rebecca McKie’s novel “I Have Some Questions for You.” The play tells the story of a woman who returns to the boarding school where she spent her childhood. We talk in more detail here.
