Friday 26th June was the kick off for the Human Voices Only campaign across various social media. Using the hashtag #HumanVoicesOnly, it brought together voice artists and writers to showcase the talent of the written and spoken word.

A number of voice artists and writers took part in the campaign. Each writer submitted short extracts of their work (up to a minute’s worth of reading time, so about 200 words) and they were assigned to voice actors. The actors recorded their interpretation of the piece and put together a video for posting on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

I submitted three extracts, expecting maybe one of them. I was pleasantly surprised to find all three got recorded!

The pieces submitted were all from Lurking Omnibus, my short story collection. Two were from Coch a Gwyn, my totally not a Love Story about dragons. The third was from Gods of Diplomacy, the Arcroc tale where Captain Rachel Drake has to go undercover to stop a nefarious womanising diplomat. The story where I had to stop myself from having her say ‘The name’s Drake, Rachel Drake…’

All three were read by Abby Hopewell who did a remarkable job interpreting the characters and themes with very little guidance from me.

It was quite a weird feeling to hear my words said aloud by someone else. Quite the ego trip. I have done readings of my work at conferences before (anyone who knows me knows I am not shy about this) but I am seriously considering hiring Abby just to come to cons to do it for me. Not that I could afford that… If I can figure out a way to sell it, I would also consider hiring her to read the full versions of some of the stories. Not had much experience of selling audiobooks though so this may have to be a long term plan.

I was also amused to see the comments on the videos on Insta. Lot of people liked the characters (or, in one case, said they already hated one of them… in a nice way…).

So, all in all, a very positive experience and one which has, I am sure, made progress in promoting the idea that creativity and art should be human not AI.

The other two videos are shown below…