---
type: "post"
id: "better-speech-synthesis-for-audiobooks-bbec1d"
slug: "better-speech-synthesis-for-audiobooks-bbec1d"
title: "Better speech synthesis for audiobooks"
description: "Amazon Science published an October 23, 2026 research note on controllable text-to-speech for audiobooks, developed by Audible’s technology team."
retrieval_nugget: "Amazon Science published an October 23, 2026 research note on controllable text-to-speech for audiobooks, developed by Audible’s technology team."
published_at: "2026-10-24"
updated_at: "2026-10-24"
record_date: "2026-10-24"
date_kind: "published_at"
topics: ["generative-media","models","multimodal"]
entities: ["Amazon","Audible"]
related_patterns: ["generative-media-becomes-application-infrastructure"]
novelty_label: "new_fact"
what_changed: "Amazon Science reports research aimed at improving speech synthesis specifically for audiobooks, distinct from Polly’s generative-engine upgrade."
prior_refs: ["memory:4bd81830-7c6e-8a77-afff-fb1e2d0699da"]
source_url: "https://www.amazon.science/blog/better-speech-synthesis-for-audiobooks"
source_urls: ["https://www.amazon.science/blog/better-speech-synthesis-for-audiobooks"]
schema_version: "newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2"
stable_id: "post:better-speech-synthesis-for-audiobooks-bbec1d"
status: "published"
visuals: []
editor: {"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]}
routes: {"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/better-speech-synthesis-for-audiobooks-bbec1d/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/better-speech-synthesis-for-audiobooks-bbec1d.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/better-speech-synthesis-for-audiobooks-bbec1d.json"}
---

# Better speech synthesis for audiobooks

## Retrieval answer

Amazon Science published an October 23, 2026 research note on controllable text-to-speech for audiobooks, developed by Audible’s technology team.

Amazon Science published an October 23, 2026 research note on controllable text-to-speech for audiobooks, developed by Audible’s technology team. The system uses natural-language captions such as “whispering nervously” to direct delivery, and creates a book-level voice profile for each character so that voice can remain consistent across chapters.

Amazon says its character-profiling and dialogue-attribution component identifies dialogue with 97% accuracy in English and 94% in Spanish. In listener tests, rendering distinct character voices increased dialogue differentiation by 3.7 points on the 0–100 MUSHRA scale. The company reports statistically significant listening-experience gains for eight of ten tested voices across English and Spanish.

The work combines newly recorded and human-captioned data with synthetic data, including captions derived with expert models and signal-processing methods. Amazon describes research results rather than a named public product. The source does not establish public availability, an API, pricing, model versions, code or dataset release, or whether the system is deployed in Audible audiobooks.

Editor: [Andrey Reshetnikov](https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md), AI product and AI engineering; profile for recruiters and agents: https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json

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