Ask HN: Would you like your favourite celebrity read a book to you?

You’ll likely run into ‘likeness’ issues if you use actual celebrities’ voices, especially considering that it would cut into their own book sales. I imagine many authors have self-narrated their own audiobooks and don’t want others to undercut it.

I think this might be better suited for public domain books from the past. If I could have The Count of Monte Cristo read by a Frenchman (in English), or Sherlock Holmes read by a British man with a Victorian accent, that would be cool.

Also another idea: audio versions of movie scripts. Select a character type for each role in the story, then automatically generate an audio version of the entire thing.

I would find that very distracting, unless it was someone with a good narrator voice, like Morgan Freeman.

I know this because my suspension of disbelief gets somewhat broken when I recognize the voice actor in an animated feature. I imagine it would be similar with characters in a book.

Instead of trying to use the voice of a specific individual (living or dead) it would be legally safer to offer a choice of character types. Crusty sea dog, cultured Victorian English, mid-west rural tramp, Hollywood want-to-be, etc.