What happens when the voice is "solved" with AI?

I fell into the rabbit hole of TTS models — didn't check the field in a while, and was insanely impressed. Tried all major paid tools(ElevenLabs/InWorld/etc.), as well as the newest open-source models. But of course, none of them are on the 100% human level, especially in the long-form narration

I started asking myself: what happens when the voice is "solved"? E.g. it gets impossible to distinguish it from a human. Wanted to hear your opinions!

Sketched some of my own thoughts, and I see two futures:

Future 1 (nuanced):

If an author can afford it, they would almost always reach out for a human narrator. For a more or less established author, it does not make much sense to go with AI; one book is, at most, a $3,000–$4,000 fixed-cost investment into narration, and in most cases, a human voice is worth the premium. The downward pressure from TTS would likely cut costs for human labor even more, making the argument for a human voice even stronger.

Many more audiobooks would be self-published with AI by authors who are just starting out and/or do not have the means to pay for narration. On a limited budget, especially for non-fiction, AI would be the default choice. There is backlash against it, but people would partly get used to it. For most authors, the logic is quite simple: either AI narration or nothing at all, so the first option is preferable even with a bit of backlash. AI would become a way to cheaply break into audiobooks, and then it is unlikely to be used for subsequent stories as an author becomes more popular and gets traction.

AI readers, like ElevenReader and the like, would become much more popular. As TTS gets good at long-form narration and becomes cheap enough, what is the reason to pay for an audiobook narrated by AI, or a poorly human-narrated book in general? You can buy an e-book for $8–$10 and just narrate it for $1–$2 (or even less, at some point). Plus, you would likely be able to choose the narration style and narrator you like for every book. The majority would likely still stick to Audible and similar platforms, though, due to the friction of switching platforms, unless another player comes along that has this embedded into its platform. Amazon is unlikely to do it, since they are heavily incentivized to push people toward Audible.

I’m a bit torn between the last two points here: self-publishing authors and AI readers would probably just co-exist, but I can also see a future where AI readers eventually replace any non-human published audiobook, killing any audio-only platform like Audible

Future 2 (more hardline):

Anything outside of personal-brand stuff would be AI-generated. If it gets cheap and good enough, and society accepts it, everything from books to films and ads would be AI-narrated.

Human narrator would evolve as a profession — you would “sell” the rights to your voice being AI-generated, which would naturally lead to a couple hundred narrators making all the money in the industry, most likely.

It would likely create a new profession of AI sound engineers, or something like that, who would use AI to get creative with voice design and voice orchestration to get it right, since there would still be mistakes. These AI sound engineers would either concentrate around foundation model companies, like ElevenLabs, Inworld, and the like, or around separate agencies, or both.

It is also possible that it is not either/or between the two futures: the first future is the next 10 years, and the second future is a bit ahead of that.

What do you think guys?