A survey commissioned by Portland, Ore.–based AI audiobook production company Spoken found that listeners rated the company's multi-voice AI narration highly against professional human narration for character-driven fiction.

According to the survey, 61% of respondents mistook at least some of the AI narration for human, and the same number expressed favorability for the use of AI voices in multi-character scenes. For exposition without multiple characters, human narration was still preferred.

Conducted in May by Edison Research at SSRS, the survey polled 1,005 U.S. adults who identified as fiction audiobook listeners. Respondents were randomly assigned to hear excerpts narrated either by a professional human voice actor or by Spoken's "Multi-Cast technology," which the company says can render distinct voices for multiple characters within a single passage.

Spoken markets its service to authors and publishers as a lower-cost, faster alternative to traditional multi-narrator productions, which require coordinating multiple voice actors. The company says authors can select AI-generated character voices or license AI-cloned voices from professional narrators, who are paid for each use.

Overall, 65% of listeners in that survey said they were likely to listen to a full Spoken multi-voice audiobook after hearing a sample, up from 31% who said they were willing before hearing one, according to the release. Among self-identified frequent audiobook listeners, 81% said they were interested in hearing distinct voices for each character, with 51% describing themselves as "very interested."

The release also states that narration quality, "immersiveness," and the presence of multiple character voices were the top factors increasing listeners' likelihood of choosing an AI-narrated audiobook, ranking above lower cost or the use of a celebrity narrator.

The release lands weeks after the Audio Publishers Association, in its own 2026 Consumer Survey, also conducted by Edison Research at SSRS, reported that listener willingness to try AI-narrated audiobooks is falling, not rising.

According to that survey, released June 5, willingness to try AI-narrated titles dropped from 70% in 2025 to 61% in 2026, and only 16% of audiobook listeners have listened to an AI-voiced title at all. AI-narrated titles accounted for just 0.03% of audiobook sales revenue in 2025, even as the number of AI-narrated titles published has grown.

"While there is some small appetite for AI-generated narration, the research that Edison conducted for us just a few short months ago notes that the percentage of those audiobook listeners who have listened to AI-narrated audiobooks is still quite low," APA executive director Jim Dinegar told PW. "In fact, from 2025-2026, there is a decline in the preference for AI-narrated audiobooks among those who have listened to one."

Dinegar acknowledged price sensitivity as a factor in AI narration's growing use for production. "Many of these productions are generated from back-catalogs or for books that may never find a robust enough market to justify the expense of recording," he said.

Notably, while Edison Research conducted the consumer research behind both Spoken's and the APA's studies, it employed different survey designs. The Spoken study measured reactions to a controlled, blind listening exercise; the APA study measured self-reported general willingness among the broader audiobook-listening public.

Whether AI can supplant human narration remains contested: dialogue-heavy fiction often relies on the kind of emotional and psychological interplay between voices found in stage drama, while a single human narrator can bring an interpretive, culturally inflected point of view to a text that AI narration, however human-like, is not designed to replicate.

The competing surveys also arrive amid renewed industry interest in multi-voice audiobook production, demonstrated by Audible’s recent full-cast audio editions of Harry Potter. Taken together, the Spoken and APA data suggest that AI narration may be gaining ground as a commercially viable means of production as the audiobook market continues to grow, even as broader listener enthusiasm for trying it appears to be cooling.

Indeed, Dinegar remarked that recent sales research by the APA found “a steady and impressive year-over-year increase in audiobook sales—a very nice rising tide.”

"Maybe that rising tide we are experiencing lifts all types of narration,” Dinegar continued, “but according to the recent research Edison did for us, the human voice is strongly preferred by audiobook listeners.”