I am sure that you have seen the news this past week about Audible Captions, and how Amazon has settled the lawsuit by agreeing to give AAP members the option of disabling Audible's new caption feature on their audiobooks.
This detail was made clear in the AAP statement I quoted, and in the proposed settlement agreement (PDF).
But one thing that was not clearly stated anywhere in public was that Amazon is extending the same option to all authors and publishers.
I have confirmation from Audible PR that all rightsholders with audiobooks in Audible's catalog will have the same option as AAP members, and they will be able to disable or enable Audible Captions on their audiobooks.
(If you're wondering why I didn't mention this on Friday, it's because Audible PR had been radio silent since last August. They had ignored multiple emails, and I had honestly given up on communicating with them ever again, but then they contacted me about an hour after I published my post.)
Will you enable Audible Captions on your audiobooks?
Initially announced in July 2019, Audible Captions is computer-generated text that replicates the spoken words of an audiobook. The text is derived from a process that builds on the voice recognition work done for Amazon Alexa to convert what the narrator says into text.
The voice you hear will continue to be that of the narrator, but with Audible Captions you will have the option of confirming what the narrator just said with Audible's best guess (as anyone who has used Google Voice can tell you, voice-to-text conversion is not a perfect process).
When this feature is enabled, users will have their choice of font sizes. They will be able to follow the narration line-by-line, word-by-word, or through progressive type (the text will appear as if someone is typing - like one of those bad hacking scenes in a movie). Users will not, however, ahve access to the entire text (in spite of the ridiculous claims on Twitter, Audible Captions is not an ebook).
Audible Captions was delayed due to the lawsuit filed by seven publishers, but it should be available shortly.
Will you disable it on your audiobooks?
image by jeff_golden via Flickr
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