The problem
Google Play Books sought new ways to deliver value to its publishing partners by offering tools and capabilities they couldn’t find elsewhere. One major challenge was the widening gap between large publishers and smaller independents in producing audiobooks—a rapidly growing and highly profitable market. Traditional audiobook production is both costly and time-intensive, creating a significant barrier for smaller publishers and self-published authors who lack the resources to compete on equal footing.
The objective
To bridge this gap, our goal was to harness Google’s advanced machine learning and text-to-speech technologies to create a solution that would radically simplify audiobook production. We set out to design a tool that would make professional-quality audio creation accessible, efficient, and scalable for publishers of all sizes.
The result
The outcome was a first-of-its-kind auto-narration tool that redefined audiobook production for publishers. I helped design a system that lets them convert existing eBooks into professional-quality audiobooks in under two hours—using over thirty-five natural-sounding voices across multiple languages including English, Spanish, French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese. By dramatically cutting production time and cost, and offering a 52% revenue share for auto-narrated titles, we made high-quality audio creation accessible to everyone—from independent authors to major publishers converting their full back catalogs. The result: a faster, more inclusive, and truly scalable audiobook ecosystem on Google Play Books.
