The answers seem to have aged quite well! Apple specifically say that this is designed as a complement to human narration and not a replacement: some aspect of

The answers seem to have aged quite well! Apple specifically say that this is designed as a complement to human narration and not a replacement: some aspect of that is Apple protecting relationships with the audiobook industry, but it’s also fair to say that the humanness of human narration is still unmatched by text-to-speech. For many people, high quality text-to-speech will be good enough to enjoy but it doesn’t seem likely to be an audiobook replacement today. That said, I suspect it’s less of a technology issue and more cultural: the current generation growing up on robot audio will have different expectations to previous generations, the lack of humanness probably isn’t an issue for them, so even if the technology can never exactly replicate the humanness of audiobooks, it may not matter. (The text-to-speech on TikTok, for example, is often lampooned by people not of the TikTok generation for being disconcerting and annoying, whereas young people seem to have no problem with it… and that voice is much more artificial sounding than these Apple examples).