LISTEN TO THIS BLOG (NARRATED BY MY A.I. VOICEOVER MODEL) HERE
It’s been a heated topic of discussion in the voiceover industry for quite some time now – A.I. voices. Many voice over artists have reactions based on fear and anger. “The robots are here to replace us. Time to start looking for a new career!”
A.I. voices are not new. They’ve been in use in technology for several years now.
But recently, they’ve started to get better. More human sounding, and harder to differentiate from an authentic human voice.
There are several software options out there that offer A.I. voices for very competitive prices. Many offer their software for a one time purchase price, for unlimited use of their A.I. voices, for a variety of projects.
The way it works is pretty simple – you copy your text into the form, and within seconds, the program generates the A.I. speech of your text. You can then download the audio file, and use it as you wish.
I completely understand why other voiceover artists would be angry or afraid of A.I. voices.
However, I was interested in seeing if there was a way that I could leverage the technology to my benefit. Perhaps I could create an A.I. model of my own voice, and offer it as a discounted option for clients who have a budget that is under my typical rates.
So I teamed up with an A.I. voice company to create a custom A.I. voice model, based on my own voice.
All I had to do was submit about a half hour of a recent e-learning project I worked on. In just a couple of days, the voice model was ready. Now all I need to do is paste a script into the program, and within minutes, it generates an audio file of “A.I. A.J.” narrating the script.
Curious to hear what it sounds like? Just click play on the audio player at the top of this page, and you can hear my A.I. voice narrate this blog.
My initial thoughts? Actually, I was quite impressed. There’s no denying that it sounds like me. The technology is quite impressive. I’m sure that most people who are familiar with my voice would immediately know that it’s me.
However, I soon realized that there are quite a few inconsistencies in inflections and pronunciations, too many for me to feel comfortable offering it to a customer with even the smallest budget.
Of course, I could go through and fix these inconsistencies with my own voice. But with the time that would take, I might as well just voice the whole thing the old fashioned way.
The technology is certainly evolving at a fast pace. And at the rapid rate that most technology advances, I’m sure we’re only a few years away from it sounding good enough to offer as a product, for lower level projects. But for now, it doesn’t even come close to the real thing. Most voiceover projects, especially commercial projects, require advanced nuance that A.I. simply can’t duplicate at this time.
So my conclusion is this – I won’t be offering my A.I. model as a service, at least not for now.
The technology has a ways to go before I would be comfortable with that. And I feel pretty confident that there’s enough demand for real voices to keep my career thriving for many years to come, without having to worry about the robots replacing me.
If you’d like to talk about how the real me can help with your next project with my voiceover services, click here!