Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur,

bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, publishing options and marketing ideas for your book.

You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more information at

TheCreativepen.com.

And that's Penn with a double N.

And here's the show.

Hello, creatives.

I'm Joanna Penn, and this is episode number 589 of the podcast, and it is Thursday, 18th of November, 2021, as I record this.

In today's show, I'm talking to Taylan Carmes, the CEO and co-founder of Deep Zen, which produces audio content with digital narration.

Yes, it is AI Voices for audiobooks. And of course, if you

are a regular listener to the show, you will know I've been talking about this for years.

And now finally, it looks like it is about to cross the threshold into the mainstream.

So we talk about the question of quality for both fiction and nonfiction, why digital narration is such a necessity when the majority of the world's books are not available in audio and every language and every dialect, etc.

How narrators can license their voices and make additional income streams, and yes, I hope to do that, myself in

2022, cost of production and sales price, and when we might see mainstream adoption, plus

tail and hints at more tools opening up to indie authors in the next few months.

So we did record this before the news of Findaways acquisition by Spotify. And although

findaway voices do not allow digital narration at this time, Spotify do allow music generated with AI.

So perhaps that will open up other possible avenues. So we didn't talk about that because

we recorded it earlier, but you never

know. So I have done two audiobooks, short ones, with Deep Zen, co-writing a book, which is not

currently available with human narration, and that is digitally narrated by Alice in a British

...