Audible provides a great collection of audiobooks, but you do need to pay for a subscription or buy individual selections. Now, Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. The project has been selected as one of the ‘Best Inventions of 2023′ by Time magazine.

Traditionally, AI narrators and voices have limitations. Early generated voices were barely good enough for simple one phrase statements. For longer text, they tend to be very flat/monotone and have bad pacing to the point of being very painful to listen too for any extended period of time. While this is still somewhat the case, this version is much improved.

I personally love combining my workouts/hikes/drives with audiobooks – and having a new free source of good material is great.

The book selection obviously are works in the public domain, but that includes lots of classics – such as some of my favorites: Edwardian and Victorian ghost stories.

You can go to the project’s main page here to learn more, or browse the collection here.

The audiobooks are also hosted on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and the Internet Archive.