Virtual Voice

It’s going to be awhile before First Step gets an audiobook treatment. I spent some time over the past three-day weekend trying to prep an audio version and gave up. Previously, I used the Amazon KDP Virtual Voice option for both seasons of The Drop and they turned out pretty well. Yes, I’d much prefer to hire a professional and have toyed with that idea in the past, especially with First, but it just turned out to be too expensive. Using Virtual Voice costs me nothing except time and I’m sure it’ll get better. I was reminded that Amazon bills Virtual Voice as a “beta,” which makes sense considering my experience.

I ran into three problems that I can’t correct. Likely, someone with more experience than me could figure workarounds and some likely go back to the eBook manuscript, which is what VV uses as the source material. Anyway, in no particular order, here are my three reasons for halting work on an audiobook of First Step:

1) Consistency - one of my characters has an unusual name, Guion, a reference to the first African-American in space, Guion Bluford. The VV pronounces the name differently in different places. I’ve used the feature in VV to change the pronunciation when that occurs, but it still doesn’t nail it even with those changes. I can’t release an audiobook where you never know how a major character’s name will come out

2) Difference between edited pronunciation and what actually comes out - one of the buildings on the SpaceFirst campus is Hangar A-10. VV pronounces “A-10” as “ahten,” with the short vowel sound. I edited the pronunciation multiple ways and in the editing dialog got it right. But when it went back to the manuscript, it didn’t pronounce the words the way it had said them in the edit option. Again, frustrating and I certainly can’t release a book with such glaring errors

3) Chapter Headings - this is the one I could probably fix with some manuscript edits, but given the other two issues it’s not worth it at this point. It started with VV reading the number and subheading wrong for the first chapter, making it sound like the AI had a stutter. On the fourth chapter, it skipped the heading entirely. There’s another chapter where the sound stuttered again, but I couldn’t tell you which one because I’d given up by that point.

So, that’s a little bit of wasted time but at least I gave it a shot. Maybe I’ll try again in a few months.