Congratulations! You've Been Chosen to Let an AI Robot Narrate Your Book.

He's bad, but you would be worse.

He can’t pronounce “penis”, but it’s a filthy word and you should never have used it.

I’m never chosen for any cool kid stuff, so you may imagine my delight upon getting a letter from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing some weeks back with “a new beta offering”: computer-generated speech technology which would allow me to turn my print and e-books into audiobooks.

Beta — the ultimate cool kid recognition: We are offering something to our most popular, interesting, sought-after clientele and you, darling Joyce, are one of them. Double kiss, free drinks, park in front of the hydrant, nobody will bother you.

Okay, so it turns out that Amazon started offering this technology at the end of November, ‘23, so it’s possible there were a few people considered cooler than me. I can also hear the screaming out there about AI putting actors out of work. How can they possibly compete? The Amazon AI service is free.

But I have a new book, “The Satyr in Bungalow D”, which I have not mentioned in a few hours, the publisher (that would be me) had already spent a fortune on human talent: A free-lance book editor, a copy-editor, an artist to design the cover, a formatting expert. Self-publishing, a horror story I will relate here one day, unless I can sell it to the Times, cost more than the trip to Pompei I’d been thinking about, though there are similarities, immolation-wise.

Narrating the book myself was out. I had done it, thirty years ago, for a memoir about breast cancer. That book, “My Breast”, had everything: A bad boyfriend, jokes, a lump the size of a robin’s egg, the possibility of death.

“I listened to your book,” a woman told me after a reading. “I thought it would be more emotional.”

You get what I’m saying? If you can’t make a book about the possibility of your own death interesting, you are not cut out for a life upon the stage.

Oh, excuse me, I have an IM from a reader:

They had E-books thirty years ago?

Cassettes. You popped them into machines called tape recorders. I know you don’t believe me, so here’s a picture. Note the Read by the Author coverline, as if that’s a selling point. Available, naturally, on Amazon.

Clearly, I had to turn to a bot.

“Just make sure you check its pronunciation,” says my friend Carol, who wrote “Tangier Love Story”, a memoir about hanging out in Morocco with Paul Bowles. “The person who read my book mispronounced every foreign word in it.”

There’s another problem with human readers — they’re not as well-educated as bots which, after all, are getting America’s young people through college.

And Amazon offers such a variety of bot narrators: American, American Southern, British, Australian, in either a masculine or feminine voice. (Sadly, those are the only gender designations. I was hoping for Australian Trans Male Moved to Mississippi at Sixteen, but you know how touchy diversity is these days and who owns Amazon.)

The bots audition for me with a few sentences from “Pride and Prejudice”: Mr. Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance and easy, unaffected manners. Hearing it with an Australian accent added a rollicking, jolly tone that might make me finally come to Jane Austen.

My book is told from the point of view of an 18-year-old satyr; a sweet kid who believes everything he reads, but who — and this is a scandal in his community — is a virgin, who tends towards monogamy.

To tell his story, I choose “American Masculine, Age Twenty to Thirty,” a bot that sounds like a well-brought-up young man who would offer you his seat on the subway and not make fun of you when you had trouble setting up Foursquare.

The bot starts out strong, even with words I thought would throw him, like “Fleischmanns,” the name of the small Catskills town where the action takes place. It’s a few pages in, where the satyr, whose name is Danny, is proudly talking about the books he’s read that the bot gets into trouble.

“Henry Miller provided explicit detail, but treated women roughly and insultingly,” the bot says. “I found his writing so repellent I threw it out, though it was interesting to learn that humans had bones in their pen iss. Henry Miller said his was six inches long.”

Wait! A PEN iss? Like something you write with? Is that a PEN iss in your pocket or do you just want to write me something smutty?

I like to think listeners will allow for the occasional error, but this is a novel about satyrs, who while not entirely phallic-centric, refer to their equipment a lot. It may be the one word you don’t want the bot to get wrong.

There is a fix for mispronunciation; you highlight the word in the manuscript and write it out phonetically.

“Peenis”, I write, which I feel is pretty clear.

“Pee-NISS,” the bot says, emphasizing the second syllable.

I try again.

“PEEnis,” I write.

“PEEnus,” the bot says.

Close enough. And the nice thing about editing an audiobook is you can do other things as you work: straighten out the house, make yourself a cup of coffee, as the bot takes you into that magical world you’ve created.

“The fields are crazy yellow with danDEEleons,” the bot reads.

What the fuck?

I run back to the computer.

“Danduhlions,” I type.

“Dan doo lyons,” the bot says, pronouncing the last syllable like a city in France.

This is like having a two-year-old. But how important is the name of a flower, which is actually a weed? Let’s amble on to — oh, crap — Yiddish?

This book takes place around Jewish hotels and it’s loaded with Yiddish. The bot is okay with “Oy”, but when we get to the old lady hotel owner who often lapses into Yiddish, calling the satyr meyn mlakh, my angel, he’s so bad I see the Anti-Defamation League coming down on me.

Trying to write a series of Yiddish words phonetically drives me so crazy that I hit the wrong button, removing everything I have been working on for the last three hours. Which is when I come to a decision:

It is morally indefensible to have bots narrating books. As a publisher, I will have no part of it. If the book makes money and Mandy Patinkin is available, I will hire him. Given the competition these days, I expect he’ll be lowering his fee anyway.