These use Amazon’s Virtual Voice feature. I was pleasantly surprised by how convincing these artificial voices were, and I hope you will enjoy them as well. I had to have Claude Cowork resplit the chapters for the ebooks on the Hunter Healer King trilogy, so that each chapter was strictly a Chloe POV or a Maxim POV, because you can’t switch voices midchapter with Virtual Voice. If you have any issues with the new formatting, please let me know. For the Jaiya books, I only had the series collections voiced.

For my fellow writers, I have some additional tips below the cut…

-once you realize that a specific word is giving the voice problems, you can edit pronunciation and apply to all other instances it can find of that word, but it won’t necessarily find all of them. It will however highlight the instances it fixed. Use the search option towards the top of the Virtual Voice studio to see if there are any it missed.

-if you have multiple third-person POVs, just go with a voice whose sex matches the majority of the POV characters. Most of the Jaiya and Ancestors of Jaiya books include male POV scenes, but the female lead is always the majority POV, so I just went with with a female narrator. Same for Pride & Planetoids. The Star Master duology has 4-5 male POVs and one female POV, so I used a male narrator. I did test the voices on opposite sex POV chapters (like the opening Darcy POV chapter in Planetoids).

-The Hunter Healer King books are dual first person POV, as told by the woman and man whose partnership drives the books. Chloe is the majority POV, so I chose a female voice as the “primary” voice for the book, and then individually set the Maxim chapters to a male voice. (Claude had helpfully added the narrating character’s name to each chapter heading.)

-Here are the voices that I used for different works:

—“Skynet” As Your Secretary: American English 6. This is a pleasant, soothing woman’s voice, very middle of the road. Reminds me a little of the character Asterix Astrid from the Fringe tv series.

—Jaiya Metaseries and Pride & Planetoids: British English 1. This is a fairly no-nonsense but expressive woman’s voice. Seemed to do well with the irony in Planetoids.

—Star Master: American English 18. this is a deep, commanding male voice with slight Samuel L. Jackson vibes. I found it fun to imagine the books as being narrated by Samir the World-Walker, a supporting Star Master character who’s basically Mace Windu as played by Avery Brooks if he had just finished reading The Hobbit and really liked Gandalf’s grumpier moments.

–Hunter Healer King: The Chloe POVs go to Southern American English 1, which I felt suited her “cowgirl” vibes. If you’ve seen Elizabeth Wheatley’s skits about the different romance subgenres arguing, Southern American English 1 sounds a bit like Wheatley’s Paranormal Romance voice. The Maxim POVs are British English 11. This is a brisk, earnest male voice, very posh (like all the British English options) but with an underlying vulnerability and decent emotional range. I really enjoyed listening to this one on its own merits.

–Note: the sample text that all the virtual voices recite when you audition them, is a moment from the Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.”