So, using the banal tones of a machine-generated voice is a sure-fire way to foster disengagement from your audience in the same way that audiences can subconsciously switch off to background noise (such as the radio).ĪI voices do not carry the influence of distinct regional accents, nor can they carry the weight of real-world experiences that bridge the narrator's emotions with the audience.īut AI voices are a positive thing – yes, really! In just a few seconds of natural human speech, you listen to a voice influenced by the lifelong journeys and travels of that person’s life. While it's true that some companies have achieved relatively impressive results with a limited selection of synthetic voices, it is the inability of the AI voice to understand the purpose or meaning of a script that cripples widespread adoption. But are they any good?Ī quick Google search will yield many companies claiming to provide fully synthetic and apparently authentic-sounding TTS voice-over services that they claim are indistinguishable from actual, human voices. Tech companies like Voicery are using AI to develop bespoke, synthetic voices for brands. Now, many small, independent developers are jumping onto the Text-to-Speech (TTS) bandwagon, harvesting large databases and libraries of spoken audio in an attempt to create a more human-sounding voice emulator to build a passive income stream. Naturally, this includes an ever-expanding variety of uses for synthetic AI voices. Oh, the humanity!ĪI (Artificial Intelligence) represents the fastest growing and the most important strand of technological development of recent generations. Billions of dollars have been invested by these four companies alone in creating human voice emulators that sound as human as humanly possible. And Apple’s 2005 release of the Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) featured an inbuilt voice-over for the first time.įast forward to the Apple launch of “Siri” in 2011, and later, Amazon’s Alexa in 2017, along with Google’s own synthetic voice and Microsoft’s many iterations of Cortana. Microsoft’s SAPI4 and SAPI5 speech synthesis are add-ons for Windows 95 and 98. This voice ended up becoming one of the most well know things about Professor Hawking.ĪLSO READ: The Neutral English Accent – Should we give up on neutrality?īoth Apple and Microsoft have researched, pioneered and developed synthetic AI voice systems for decades. In 1988, Stephen Hawking’s adoption of Intel’s Speech Plus system enabled him to regain an audible voice after developing a slowly progressing form of Motor Neurone Disease. 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. 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.
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