A few years later, the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga wowed audiences by pioneering their own primitive speech emulators. The 1986 model of Texas Instruments Speak & Spell (famously featured in Steven Spielberg’s ET) was the first consumer product ever made with a self-contained LPC speech synthesiser IC. This was released in 1982 to compete with the Atari 2600. In 1977, toy giants Mattel began developing a game console called Intellivision, which included a voice synthesis module. Speech Synthesis has been an important part of mainstream life for around four decades. These would form the basis for many “robot voices”, which strongly influenced popular music, television, and filmmaking.Īfter this, Douglas Rain’s rendition of the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s legendary film 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first time a mainstream audience could hear a notional concept of an AI voice that could replicate a degree of human intonation and inflexion. One could argue that AI voices are ultimately born from Homer Dudley, a Bell Labs engineer who began developing the first vocoder in 1928. Is there a future tipping point where AI voice-overs will have a serious impact on the voice-over industry? Let's build some perspective on what is happening. AI technology has already impacted other industries, so, understandably, many performers are getting increasingly concerned about the longevity of their profession. For many, voice-over work is an important part of their income. Here at Voquent, we work with thousands of professional performers. Many of these companies claim that their 'instant access voices' are virtually indistinguishable from human voices. The proliferation of tech start-ups pitching cheap, off-the-shelf, synthetic voice-overs have accelerated their marketing in recent years. ![]() Bosch said they are working on systems to identify whether somebody is using a synthetic voice.Anyone requiring voice-over for their productions will have no doubt encountered, and perhaps even considered using, an AI voice instead of a human voice actor. These most recent speech-to-speech systems are not likely to fool most people, but even Voicemod recognised that security is a concern. The rise of deepfake technology has some in the political and tech worlds concerned, though deepfakes still have a long way to go if they want to be more effective than good old fashioned online disinformation. ![]() The flip side of this technology is the potential for abuse. As much as companies like Meta want to let you recreate yourself in a virtual world, others would prefer to express their inner selves when creating online personas.ĬEO and co-founder Jaime Bosch wrote that the tech “enables a previously impossible level of customisation in audio expression online and in the metaverse.” In a statement to Gizmodo, Bosch said they want to support the full slate of trans, nonbinary, gender-fluid, and gender-queer users to “better empower them to build their own unique sonic identities.” Many of these companies, including Voicemod, refer to the nebulous “metaverse” when describing how this technology could be used to create personalised avatars. Other startups are also working on AI technology that facilitates the trans community online. It means the masculine “Bob” and feminine “Alice” voices are perhaps the most interesting, and potentially consequential for people trying to express their identities when appearing online.
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