In a new audiobook edition of the “Odyssey,” Homer’s nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem, the voice of the British actor Michael Caine delivers the story’s soaring opening lines in his distinctive, gravelly staccato.
“Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man who, having overthrown the sacred town of Ilium, wandered far and visited the capitals of many nations, learned the customs of their dwellers, and endured great suffering on the deep,” Caine’s voice intones over a soft, melancholy orchestral score.
Caine is the latest celebrity to lend his voice to Homer’s epic, following acclaimed narrations of the “Odyssey” by actors like Claire Danes and Ian McKellen. But Caine isn’t really telling the story. Instead, he licensed his voice to ElevenLabs, a company that produces audiobooks and other content voiced by artificial intelligence, which used an A.I. clone of his voice for the project.
A team of four producers created the 13-hour audiobook, which came out on Tuesday and is available free on the company’s ElevenReader platform. The production features Caine’s voice clone and a supporting cast of 20 different A.I. voices layered with A.I.-generated sound effects and a musical score, and was put together in just over six weeks.
The project, explained Jack McDermott, who leads mobile growth and marketing at ElevenLabs, is meant to showcase the creative potential of voice clones and A.I. narration — all while capitalizing on heightened interest in the “Odyssey” ahead of Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood adaptation, which comes out in July and stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway.
“The idea was, What would be an amazing piece of content, to show what’s possible in the responsible use of A.I. voice featuring an iconic voice?” McDermott said. “On the one hand, it’s about great storytelling. At the same time, this has a really great effect of showing creators around the world, and authors, what can be done with ElevenReader.”
In a way, the “Odyssey,” about the warrior Odysseus’ long and dangerous journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, lends itself particularly well to the audiobook format. The poem, along with the other great work attributed to Homer, the “Iliad,” was composed to be recited by performers.
“If you want to be pedantic, the real way to experience these epics is to listen to them,” said the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, whose translation of the “Odyssey” was released last year.
But some listeners may find it unsettling to hear an oral masterpiece from ancient Greece recounted by A.I.-generated voices, and may question whether such a rendition can capture the emotional and dramatic scope of Homer’s tale.
The audiobook is landing at a moment when the “Odyssey” is splashed all over social media, thanks to Nolan’s film. The timing is deliberate. Seeing an opportunity to seize on the increased interest in Homer’s poem to showcase ElevenLabs’ technology, the company’s executives tapped Caine for the project.
Caine, an Academy Award winner, was an obvious choice: He had struck a deal with the company in the fall to feature his voice in the ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace, which allows companies to license famous voices.
The A.I. edition of the “Odyssey,” with its high-profile synthetic narrator and splashy rollout, could become a test case for whether audiobook listeners are open to an A.I. version of a beloved actor’s voice.
While synthetic narration has spread in recent years, with A.I.-generated audiobooks now available on major platforms both legally and illegally, it’s unclear how popular they are with listeners, who often value a narrator’s performance as much as the book itself. According to a survey released in June by the trade group Audio Publishers Association, only 16 percent of audiobook listeners reported listening to an A.I.-voiced audiobook.
That hasn’t stopped professional narrators from fearing a future where publishers and audiobook production companies can cut out human narrators entirely by ordering up faster, cheaper A.I. narrations featuring facsimiles of famous voices.
“The slippery slope of synthetic celebrity voices is, of course, that publishers will simply license those voices for more and more projects, resulting in fewer possibilities for everyone else,” said Edoardo Ballerini, a prominent audiobook narrator who believes that synthetic narration poses a threat to the industry.
ElevenLabs executives say that the company uses A.I. narration mostly to create audiobooks for titles that probably wouldn’t have otherwise gotten audio editions, and that the technology is adding to the audiobook landscape rather than threatening the careers of human narrators. As for whether A.I. narration results in an inferior experience for listeners, the company’s executives say the marketplace will be the judge.
“Audiences will decide, at the end of the day,” said Dustin Blank, who oversees ElevenLabs’ talent and strategic partnerships, including the Iconic Marketplace. “It’s up to them. No one’s forcing this in our ears.”
The ElevenLabs “Odyssey” will most likely be polarizing. When the company announced in November that Caine and the actor Matthew McConaughey had struck deals with ElevenLabs to have their voices cloned, people reacted with fury on social media, accusing them of selling out and endangering the careers of actors and narrators.
“The ‘Odyssey’ is one of the greatest stories ever told,” Caine said in a statement released by ElevenLabs. “By bridging classical storytelling with digital innovation, this timeless epic is reimagined for modern audiences, brought vividly to life through ElevenReader’s cutting-edge technology.”
The ElevenLabs “Odyssey” uses an English-language translation by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, which was published in the early 1870s and is now in the public domain. Caine’s replicated voice delivers lines of omniscient narration in his slightly gruff Cockney British accent. While the voice clone sounds unmistakably like Caine, the performance comes across as reserved and distant, with little emotional modulation.
To voice other characters, like Odysseus and his family and a large cast of warriors, monsters, gods and goddesses, the ElevenLabs team employed dozens of other A.I. voices from its catalog. The casting process was mostly seamless, executives said — though for some characters, like the goddess Athena, producers tried multiple A.I. voices before getting it right.
Some of the most dramatic and emotional scenes in the story — like the sequence in which Odysseus returns to Ithaca — fall flat. There isn’t a trace of rage in Odysseus’s voice when he warns the suitors who have been wooing his wife, Penelope, in his absence that they’re about to die. And when the terrified suitors respond, they sound more serene than scared.
Scholars and translators have mixed feelings about whether an A.I. narration can do justice to Homer’s poetic lines.
The translator Emily Wilson, whose groundbreaking translation of the “Odyssey” was released in 2017, worries that synthetic voices can’t recreate the emotional nuances of the text. The “Odyssey” is an adventure tale, but it’s also an intimate story about marriage, memory, family, loss and home.
“So much of both translation and other interpretive activities is about human judgment,” Wilson said. With a human narrator, “the voice and the thinking behind the character can emerge over the course of the performance,” she said, adding: “It’s hard to see how A.I. can really do that.”
Others see the potential for A.I. to draw new audiences to the “Odyssey,” either because the narration is free and widely accessible online or because people are curious to hear an A.I. Michael Caine.
Mendelsohn, who narrated the audiobook for his own translation of the “Odyssey,” noted that the poem had been adapted many times over into new narrative forms, like fiction and film.
“The reason that these works survived is that they keep having something to say to every new generation, in every new historical period,” Mendelsohn said. “A.I. is another new technology, and if it can be used to bring out everything that is wonderful in this work, why not? These things have been infinitely adapted.”
