Post by Thomas Anderson

Hey everyone, Yesterday, we announced our decision at Blinkist to stop using AI narration on our Blinks and continue with human narrators only. Over the past couple of years, we’d worked hard experimenting and innovating with AI-voices and had made some real progress. But, despite this effort, we couldn’t get them to the same level as our human narrators. What’s more, we were increasingly getting more feedback from our users that something was being lost in the AI-narrated Blinks – there was a lack of spark, emotion and connection. So we made our decision. I always knew that human-narrated Blinks were important to our users, but I have been blown away by the tide of positive feedback we’ve received. It’s been incredibly heartwarming to see how much everyone really cares about the human connection in Blinks (and learning content in general). I recognize the error we made in experimenting with AI-narration, but I am pleased we were able to correct it. If you were one of the Blinkist users who gave us feedback about AI-narration or sent a positive message in the last day or so, thank you.