The evidence is growing: listening is good for us!

A few weeks ago, our Global Head of Production, Sam Dillon, wrote a love letter to his headphones. Not literally to the pieces of plastic themselves. Although, judging by the article, the relationship is pretty serious.

Sam described his headphones as his “third place”. Somewhere he has learned, laughed, reflected and occasionally escaped to over the years. They have accompanied him through commutes, parenthood and big decisions. His point was that plugging into his headphones doesn't block out life. Quite the opposite, it can help us experience it more fully.

At Forever Audio, we spend every second of the day creating beautiful, world-class audio, and delivering it to a fast-growing global market. Or as we say, ‘Amplifying Brands, Captivating Audiences’. We think endlessly about the perfect voices, performances, pauses, soundscapes and the tiny details that can make audio feel completely absorbing.

And it’s not just anecdotal, there is a growing body of evidence showing that listening to great audio is good for our (and our family's) health and wellbeing. 

A recent Storytel study, The 2026 Story Report, surveyed more than 5,000 adults across five European countries and found a consistent relationship between regular audiobook consumption and higher self-reported wellbeing. Depending on the country, between 84% and 93% of people who listened to audiobooks regularly said they felt audiobooks contributed positively to their wellbeing

And whilst most of us know there’s a stark difference between an AI voice and a human one, we might not always be able to put our finger on exactly what the difference is. 

Throughout the business, we use AI voice technology as a useful tool for testing ideas, checking script timings, creating guide tracks and (if clients want it) to voice corporate content. These are valuable tools and they are improving quickly. But our experience is that we're still a long way from replicating the nuance of a great human performance, especially when it comes to multiple voices interacting with one another. 

There’s been some fascinating research this year into how we respond differently to AI voices and human voices. In a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal, the researchers studied 240 university students, comparing empathetic human narration, AI-generated narration and self-reading. And the human-narrated material produced significantly greater short-term reductions in anxiety than AI narration.

The research suggests that the benefits stem from qualities professional voice performers, great voice directors and sound engineers intuitively understand: prosody, changes in pitch, rhythmic pauses and empathetic tone. Those tiny variations create an almost poetic emphasis: cues we instinctively respond to, find comfort in and learn from. Together, they can create what the paper describes as a sense of “supportive presence”.

The hesitation before a sentence. The smile you can somehow hear. A breath left deliberately in. Knowing when not to give a line everything. Those decisions are extremely difficult to reduce to individual parameters. And in our experience, you can easily spend more time prompting an AI than you would getting a great performance when working with an actor.

As a father of three, I’m a huge fan of the new screenless devices for kids that have taken off in the past few years. And we are extremely lucky to work on so many of the productions that my kids then enjoy. But this is not a shameless plug! So many of us loved the experience back in the 70s or 80s when we used to listen to cassettes and storybooks for hours on end in our bedrooms. The delivery format might have changed, but the emotional connection, the sheer absorption, the firing of the imagination, all remains the same: it’s like no other experience. 

In July 2026, the National Literacy Trust released a nationally representative survey of 3,000 parents and carers of children aged 5 to 18 in the UK. Parents described audiobooks as fitting naturally into family life, from bedtime to weekends, and quieter moments at home.

Of families who listened together, 93.5% said they enjoyed doing so. Almost two-thirds (63.2%) said audiobooks strengthened family bonds, while 47.0% said they helped them feel more involved in their child’s interests. 

And we think that’s pretty amazing!

None of this means audio needs to compete with books, films, games or anything else. The joy is that it asks something different of us. 

No wonder Sam loves it.

Time to put the headphones on and hit play!