Audible, the audiobook company owned by Amazon, announced on Wednesday that it is testing an AI-powered search feature to assist users in narrowing down their audiobook search.
Starting today, select U.S. customers can interact with “Maven,” Audible’s new personal recommendation expert that surfaces title suggestions based on users’ specific requests. A user can use natural language to enter queries, and Maven will respond by providing tailored recommendations pulled from Audible’s catalog of nearly one million titles. For instance, “I’m looking for an uplifting fiction novel with a female protagonist.”
Maven is available on iOS and Android devices. Around half of Audible’s U.S. customers across all membership plans will have access to the feature, which is currently limited to a “subset” of the audiobook library, the company wrote in its blog post.
As with any beta product, Audible will continue to enhance it as time goes on.
Audible didn’t specify which AI models were powering the feature. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that Maven leverages “the strengths of multiple models” and will “continuously evaluate” as models improve.
The company is using AI in other ways as well. Alongside the Maven launch announcement, the company revealed it’s also experimenting with AI-curated collections and AI-generated review summaries. The former feature mentioned is one of note as it could be Audible’s response to Spotify’s AI-generated playlists.
Today’s announcement follows the report that thousands of AI-voiced audiobooks are being listened to by Audible users. This has prompted backlash from creatives who are threatened by robots taking audiobook narrator jobs. As of May, more than 40,000 titles were labeled with an AI narrator, and that number has likely grown.
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Updated 8/7/24 at 2:55 pm ET with the correction that Audible is testing AI-generated summaries of reviews, not AI-generated reviews.
