Tom Bruno asked Michael Shotter:

I have seen several of your Audiobooks in the store using Virtual Voice. What is your experience with it? Does it magically work, do you have to edit it a lot?

Michael Shotter Virtual Voice, at least in its current form, requires a lot of editing to produce the results you hear in my finished audiobooks. In an average book, there are hundreds, or even thousands, of pauses, pronunciation changes, and reading-speed tweaks that have to be manually identified, added, adjusted, and confirmed, and even then, it's never absolutely perfect. Basically, it takes at least 5 to 10 times as many hours as the book is long to do everything properly, so it's definitely not a "push a button, get a viable audiobook" sort of process. Still, it does save a noteworthy amount of time and effort versus recording my own narrations and the technology is improving all the time, so I generally consider it a very helpful tool that can produce fairly impressive and enjoyable results for readers with effort, which is why I've opted to make use of it for several of my books. Thanks for the question!

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