Swedes increasingly positive about AI-narrated audiobooks

In the Publishers Association's recently published Book Barometer for 2026, it emerges that Swedes' attitude towards AI-written books is very negative. However, the attitude and willingness to listen to audiobooks narrated with a synthetic AI voice is surprisingly positive among those who have actually tried it.

On page 19 of the Publishers Association's Book Barometer 2026 one can read:

"A survey of audiobook listeners who have themselves listened to AI-generated audiobook voices in a book streaming service shows that a majority (54 %) are positive towards such synthetic voices and could imagine continuing to listen to them."

This aligns well with the feedback we have seen on the roughly 100 audiobooks that have been produced and published via GoRead's platform since the launch 3 months ago. Many still have a skeptical attitude towards audiobooks that are not narrated by a human, but those who nevertheless give AI listening a chance are often surprised by how good and natural the narration actually is.

The average rating on Storytel for the audiobooks produced and published through GoRead is today 3.7 stars, based on 519 ratings so far. That is slightly below the average rating for human-narrated audiobooks (4.0 stars) but still at a fully acceptable level.

The image with the review
"Well-written short story. The narrator was one of the best I have heard, (and I listen to loads of audiobooks per year)" refers to an audiobook that is AI-narrated by GoRead's voice Agneta Ernst [AI].

We get the impression that the reviewer is not aware that the narration was done by an AI voice, which says something about the perceived quality of GoRead's AI-narrated audiobooks when preconceptions about AI voices do not get in the way of the choice of audiobook.

At GoRead we have developed an editing step that we currently run ourselves on all audiobook productions, but which at a future point will be placed in the hands of you as a user, so that you get even better control over the final result. During the editing, we go through and correct the pronunciation of the words that, from experience, we judge could risk sometimes getting an incorrect pronunciation.

Good luck with your audiobook productions!

Kind regards,

The GoRead Team