A new Edison Research at SSRS study commissioned by Spoken, an AI audiobook company, revealed that the company’s multi-voice productions achieved a higher favorability rating than human-narrated productions.

The study, conducted in May 2026, is based on a survey of 1,005 fiction audiobook listeners split into two groups, each of which were made to listen to excerpts of either an AI-generated audiobook or a human-narrated one. During playback, the respondents didn’t know that AI voices were used, and they were not told which method was used for the production before they heard them.