Why I used AI voices to narrate my multi-POV fantasy series (and how you can listen)
What began as a workaround for the cost of audiobook production became one of the most creatively satisfying parts of publishing The Artifex and the Muse.
TL;DR The Artifex and the Muse audiobooks are now streaming FREE
Dear reader,
As a young bookworm, I loved nothing more than curling up with a novel and losing myself in a good story for hours on end. But grown-up life here on the farm is packed with projects in every season, and these days it’s hard to sit still long enough to fully immerse myself in a physical book. Even ebooks have their limitations when you’re out pruning the apple orchard or plowing snow from a mile-long driveway.
So, like many book-lovers, I’ve come to rely on audiobooks to discover new authors and revisit my favorite stories. I’m not alone—listenership has exploded in recent years, and audiobooks now make up a major segment of the publishing industry.
Given how much I enjoy audiobooks, I’ve long wanted to make The Artifex and the Muse available to listeners. Unfortunately, the cost of producing high-quality audiobooks—especially for a multi-book, multi-POV series—was out of reach for me as an indie author.
Fast forward to 2024. The rise of generative AI tools—including synthetic voices—opened up a fascinating new possibility: I might be able to create a full cast of narrators myself. I began experimenting with several platforms and quickly settled on ElevenLabs Studio as my preferred tool. Even a year ago, the quality and variety of their voices blew me away.
Designing custom voices for each character turned out to be surprisingly fun. Within days, I’d crafted compelling voices for determined Ava, curious Dom, energetic Emmie Bridges, world-weary other-Dom, commanding Lilith, and the mystical Voice in All.
But even the most forgiving listener would’ve noticed the rough edges. As impressive as AI voices were in 2024, they weren’t well suited to long-form fiction narration. Digital artifacts and robotic intonation broke the immersive experience, especially when listening over many hours. I tried brute-force solutions—painstaking manual edits and many, many regenerations of awkward-sounding lines of dialogue—but the result wasn’t ready for listeners.
So I set the project aside and focused on finishing The Many Worlds, Part Three of the series.
When I returned to the audiobook project a year later, I was amazed at how much had changed. While I’d been heads-down in my writing cave, the ElevenLabs model had continued to evolve. Those character voices I’d created a year ago were still waiting in my voice library—but now, the model rendering them had improved dramatically. Many of the distracting artifacts I once found unbearable were simply gone, and the emotional performances were vastly improved.
So I decided to give the audiobook project another shot. And this time? It worked. Using the latest ElevenLabs model (as of April 2025), I found the results incredibly satisfying.
Rhythm, emphasis, alliteration, emotion—these are all things we interpret for ourselves as readers. But an audiobook requires the narrator to make a single, authoritative choice about how each of those elements will sound. Combing through every word of each book to make those decisions taught me a lot about my own writing voice—things I’d never consciously noticed before.
To my surprise, the process of creating these AI audiobooks ended up changing my writing process, too. I now listen to drafts while walking or doing chores, giving myself “fresh ears” on the text. It’s been one of the most useful editing tools I’ve found for breaking through the tunnel vision of solitary writing.
I’m now pleased to share with you the AI-narrated audiobooks of the full series, streaming free here on my author website and on the ElevenReader app. I consider them a solid v1—not perfect, not human, but deeply listenable. These performances reflect not only the growing sophistication of AI voice technology, but also my own directorial choices—to let you hear these characters the way I do.
I hope you’ll enjoy listening to the audiobooks as much as I’ve enjoyed making them.
🎧 Listen to The Artifex and the Muse FREE at audreyauden.com 🎧
Happy listening,
AA
