I cloned my voice with AI and even my wife cant tell the difference

Date:
Mon, 18 Nov 2024 16:33:16 +0000

Description:
Cloning your voice with AI is almost too easy.

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Listening to your own voice saying words youve never said before is an unsettling experience, but in the AI future which were living through right now in 2024, its almost unsurprising. Of course, AI can now clone your voice and make it sound just like you! Its almost expected, isnt it?

What is surprising, to me at least, is how easy it is to do. You can access
an AI voice cloner for free online, and clone your voice, then get it to say anything you want in just a few minutes. The training takes just 30 seconds, then youre good to go. There are no real security checks or restrictions on what you can do with that voice once youve trained it either. So, you could make it swear, or threaten somebody. There seem to be hardly any guardrails. Who's that voice?

If you type in AI Voice Cloner into a Google search bar youll be spoiled for choice. A lot of the voice cloners require you to sign up for a monthly fee before they will clone your voice, but quite a few of them have a free
option. I tried a few of the free choices and some of them, despite promising unparalleled accuracy, produced a robotic version of my voice that was going to fool nobody. No, I had a higher goal in mind: I wanted to produce a clone of my voice that would fool my wife.

I eventually settled on Speechify to clone my voice, since it combined ease
of use, full access to the voice cloner, and a 30-second training time. Once youve made a free account on Speechify you simply talk to your microphone for 30 seconds or longer to train your AI voice. Once youve done that you can
type in some text and hit the Generate button to hear the words spoken back
to you in your own voice.

If you're concerned about security, Speechify has a pretty detailed privacy statement , and it does say that it will never sell your information and is committed to protecting the privacy of your data. So, your uploaded voice should be for only you to use.

I thought what I created was pretty convincing, but I needed to see what my wife thought. I crept up behind her and played a sample clip of me and well ok, she laughed because she could tell it was coming out of my MacBooks speakers, but she was impressed. "Actually, she said, I think it sounds like you, but better .

And that is the benefit of cloning your voice. It doesnt make mistakes when
it talks. There are no ums and ahs and it gets everything right the first time. If I think about how many times Ive had to record and re-record the intros to my podcasts because I couldnt get it quite right, I can see an obvious application for an AI voice cloner. But thats also a danger in AI voice cloning because you can get the fake voice to say just about anything. Daisy, the AI granny, was an AI voice created to trap scammers into long and fruitless phone calls. (Image credit: O2 Virgin Media) Voices from the beyond

While scams that involve stealing your voice are one level of concern, the security implications have ramifications that go even beyond the grave. Recently the legendary late British talk show host, Michael Parkinson , surprised everybody by announcing that he was launching a new podcast called Virtually Parkinson. Thanks to the miracles of AI his voice would be interviewing people in real time once again. In Parkinsons case, his estate
is fully behind the podcast, but what if permission has not been given?

David Attenborough, the grandfather of the BBCs natural history programming recently expressed unease at an AI version of his voice, describing it as " disturbing ". We live in an age where AI can create podcasts without any
human interaction and even AI sports presenters are starting to appear. So,
in a way, we shouldnt be surprised that its so easy for AI to clone our voices, but the implications could be profound.

With AI giving celebrities (or rather, their estates) the option to continue working long after they have shuffled off this mortal coil, the future for both celebrities and individuals suddenly seems very uncertain. You might
also like... AI and automation "could cause IT service desks to go extinct" Daisy the AI grandma is here to answer calls from scammers and waste their time Rising AI threats are making firms turn back to human intelligence



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/i-cloned-my-voice- with-ai-and-even-my-wife-cant-tell-the-difference


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