Mutual Shaping: AI-Generated Voice and Meaning-Making in Audiobook Listening

This article’s primary goal is to examine audiobooks as a context through which the interaction between human and Synthesized Voice generated by AI has become socially meaningful. More broadly, this study approaches audiobooks as a communicative process in which meaning is not transmitted but constructed through interaction between human listeners and technological agents. The new researches indicates that the audiobooks in social-technical context created new interaction between human listeners, making the AI-generated voice socially meaningful. While audiobooks have traditionally been treated as a convenience-based extension of print reading, Recent developments in AIGC have transformed audiobooks into a context in which listeners engage not only with narrative content but also with synthetic voice as a socially interpretable entity. This shift is making AI generated audiobook narration to be fundamentally experiential. Unlike traditional audiobooks, which voice is perceived as an actor. In other words, artificial intelligence-synthesized sound is a symbol of social significance. In the context of audiobooks, it interacts deeply with people, shapes people’s cognition as part of people’s daily life. In this context, speech synthesis functions as a media technology that participates in an actor network with listeners, whereby human and technological agents reciprocally influence one another and collaboratively produce social significance. This paper makes three key contributions. First, it reconceptualizes audiobooks as sociotechnical interaction sites rather than passive media formats, highlighting the active role of synthetic voice in shaping user experience. Second, it integrates CASA and ANT to provide a multi-level theoretical framework that explains synthetic voice as both a perceived social actor and a networked actor. Third, it proposes a four-stage mechanism model that specifies how social meaning is constructed through interaction with AI-generated narration.