But he warns against companies forcing performers to sign agreements that allow those companies to synthesize performers’ voices and use them for whatever they want in perpetuity. “Voice actors, their voice is intellectual property, it’s their own, or at least that’s the idea,” says David Rosenthal, CEO and coach at the Global Voice Acting Academy. And like any form of automation, there can be big downsides for the humans whose work and paychecks are getting augmented or replaced.

Like any form of automation, the promises are simple: Robots can do more work faster, and the money and time saved can be used on something else. The company says a voice clone can start to be built if it has 50 sentences from a real speaker to synthesize. Don’t miss the mark by delivering flat or generic sounding content that doesn’t foster the connection you’ve built with your audience.”Ī third company, Resemble AI, offers services like voice “cloning” and has short clips of synthetic speech from former President Barack Obama and actors Morgan Freeman and Jon Hamm (though potential clients are forbidden from cloning the voices of celebrities without permission). Sonantic’s website touts AI voices with “STUNNING REALISM, CAPTIVATING EMOTION” that can “deliver compelling, lifelike performances for games and films with fully expressive AI-generated voices.” It also promises to “reduce production timelines from months to minutes by rapidly transforming scripts into audio.”Īnother synthetic-voice company, VocaliD, pitches to potential corporate clients that “the volume and speed with which written content must be transformed into brand-consistent sound bytes cannot be met by traditional voice talent or generic text-to-speech.” It imagines scenarios “you need audible content fast, but your voice talent isn’t available. We made the first AI that can shout early this year.” “We made the first AI that can cry last year. We believe this is the CGI of audio,” says Zeena Qureshi, co-founder and CEO of Sonantic, a start-up formed in 2018. Have a video game that’s been in interminable production for years and want to avoid hauling in voice actors for rerecording every time there’s a script change? Tweak their dialogue in production.

Need a synthetic voice that can read text for the visually impaired? A human voice actor can’t preread every possible sentence in the world but an AI-built voice could cope. The voice imitation revolution is already here, and artists, technologists and companies in several industries who use the new tech are grappling with the big question of what happens when you separate speech from the speaker.

Yet the boundaries have already been pushed far beyond Bourdain’s legacy or the mere confines of documentarian ethics.

Voice deepfake app