AI Voices in eLearning

Hi all! I'd like to hear your thoughts about AI voices in training and educational material. As a neurodivergent, I personally find them distracting and less supportive of learning, despite increasing popularity. 

I've read that human voices improve learner outcomes/retention etc, yet many folks in our industry seem to love AI narration features. As someone who has both recorded voiceovers and generated them, I don't see an obvious reason to rely so heavily on the latter other than time constraints. Sure, it may save a couple hours of production time, but if learner outcomes aren't improving, shouldn't we reconsider this approach and put the audience experience first?

Please share your thoughts! I'm really curious to hear more about this. Maybe I'm missing a key point here! Maybe I'm in a minority of disliking AI voices?

And just to be clear, I’m not referring to screen readers or assistive text-to-speech. Those serve a completely different purpose and are essential for accessibility! I’m talking specifically about replacing full-course narration with synthetic voices.