We've had text-to-speech for a long time. The new element is that a context aware processing model explicitly can "understand" the story and add emotion to vocalization.

That said, Amazon can fuck all the way off with this. Let people do art and performance. Figure out how to intelligently automate your warehouses and distribution centers and don't stop paying the people you make redundant.

Fuckin' Bezos, man.

There's place for both, a lot of authors simply can't afford to have their entire book narrated by a voice actor.

Librera is a great Google Play Books alternative, and the auto read voice is much better.