On Thursday 19 September, we looked at how anyone can do AI voice cloning – at a price!
Why would you want to clone your voice? Perhaps an illness like Parkinsons means that you are gradually losing the ability to speak, or perhaps you create videos online and want flawless speech – your clone can read out text without any stumbling or hiccups. Chris first looked at ElevenLabs which is a highly regarded service.
https://elevenlabs.io/voice-cloning – Create a replica of your voice that sounds just like you
Automate video voiceovers, ad reads, podcasts, and more, in your own voice. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t allow you to do a trial voice clone for free. This is the case for all the sites Chris looked at. For free, they’ll allow you to do text to speech with predefined voices, and even get an AI voice to say what you say. But none of them will clone your voice for free. However, voice cloning looks to be very easy. See the video below:
Here are links to some similar services to play with:
https://www.wootechy.com/voice-generator/
https://speechify.com/voice-cloning/
https://ttsopenai.com
Chris played with Wootechy and ElevenLabs.The free text-to-speech options produced some interesting results. Here’s the text she uploaded to both sites:
“Let’s kick off by exploring where the term “Iberians” comes from and what it really means. Why do we call the people who lived during this period Iberians? Where does the name originate, and how has its meaning evolved over the centuries?”
.. here’s how the AI voice “John, Male” read it in Wootechy:
…and here’s how “Rachel (legal)” read it in ElevenLabs:
I think ElevenLabs wins, though the voice still sounds artificial.
With all this cloning going on – how can banks and businesses detect fake voices? As one might expect, specialist companies have sprung up to deal with the problem.
Some people like to project a different image of themselves on-line. Say your English isn’t very good. Why not use an AI cloned voice as a video voice-over instead of your own? The audio and subtitles for this short seem to have been created by using voice to text, then text to a cloned voice. The emphasis and pauses in the voice are unnatural – and you can also see mistakes in the subtitles.
If you combine voice cloning with translation tools and video you can get impressive results as in the following short.
It looks good, although comments about the video on YouTube remarked that the foreign languages she was apparently speaking were full of simple grammatical errors. Google Translate I guess!
This easy voice cloning has resulted in increasingly sophisticated scams: Mom warns of AI voice cloning scam that faked kidnapping l GMA
The world gets more unreal and unsafe by the day !… Chris Betterton-Jones – Knowlege Junkie