The technology is still extremely young and immature. As models get better, it should be possible to build tools that allow manual annotations to tweak how much

The technology is still extremely young and immature. As models get better, it should be possible to build tools that allow manual annotations to tweak how much emotion and expressiveness goes into what's being communicated, and eventually it should be possible to fully automate a first pass at this which produces passable results. In any case, I think the biggest win is that tons of books which have never received audiobooks now have the option of getting a way better alternative than legacy TTS tools. Even if current TTS tools are a bit limited, they still feel like a massive leap in quality from what was available a few years back. Making it trivial to generate better audiobooks will help make tons of information more accessible to people. The choice of audiobook is rarely going to be between a professional actor and TTS, but between no audiobook at all or a TTS version.