What is AI voice cloning And Why Is It Important
AI voice cloning is all the rage now – learn all about its importance, benefits, and fields of use in this article.
What Is Voice Cloning?
Voice cloning is not a brand new technology as it was pioneered in 1998. Both then and for a long time afterwards, it required certain technical skills, powerful hardware, and long voice samples to do its job. Voice cloning is a process of replicating a person’s voice in digital form by training neural networks on an audio sample. The cloned voice can later be used to voice over any amount of video and/or audio content.
What Are the Benefits of Voice Cloning Technology?
While there are certain ethical concerns related to the voice cloning technology, it also offers many benefits. Here are the principal ones:
Voice Cloning in Publishing
Audiobooks are steadily gaining in popularity. This is because they enable people to keep up with reading while doing other things. Audiobooks read by authors are especially popular with the readers. Voice cloning enables the publishers to free the author from numerous recording sessions by simply recording a sample of their voice.
Optimize Talent Availability
You might want to voice your corporate videos in the CEO’s voice, but they definitely don’t have the free hours to spend in the recording studio. Cloning their voice is an excellent way to ensure that you have it available when you need it. It also optimizes the time a busy person spends doing this job. This optimization benefit works for any kind of voice talent that you work with, ensuring that you have the required voice even when the talent behind it is busy.
Revive Historical Voices
Imagine watching a documentary about Britain’s part in WWII narrated by Winston Churchill or a biopic of Alfred Hitchkock told in his own voice. With AI-powered voice cloning, reviving historical voices from the existing recordings has become a reality.
Broaden Content Diversity
Voice cloning helps to broaden your content diversity. It enables you to create live weather or sports updates in the presenter’s voice without actually involving them.
Localize in New Languages
Do you need to spread the corporate message to your offices in other countries? Want to expand your audience as a video or podcast creator? Make your media content available to viewers who don’t speak the official language? Voice cloning is there to help you. With new advances, you can use a cloned voice to dub the same content in different languages – without the thick accent!
Where Is Voice Cloning Used Currently
Voice cloning technology has many applications. Here are the top three industries that currently use this technology.
Voice Cloning in Film & Television Industry
The dubbing process for a movie takes place long after the film has been shot. It may be hard to reconcile the star actor’s schedule with the demands of recording the audio track. With voice cloning such problems are easily avoided. Plus, it cuts the costs of studio lease and recording time.
Another option is adding historical voices of deceased public figures to documentaries or feature films.
Create Voice Clones for News Publishing
In the round-the-clock news cycle, the ability to provide quick updates to the stories is a must. But the reporters or presenters who voice them are not always available for recording a new audio track. After cloning their voices, the news teams can create new audio tracks by simply typing up the additional text. Voila, a weather or sports game update is born!
Voice Clones in Education
As we enter the age of life-long education, the importance of content creators in this field becomes paramount. Voice cloning enables such creators to create more content without worrying about recording separate audio tracks. They can also make it available to people around the world through dubbing in other languages.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Voice Cloning Application
As advances in AI technology have made voice cloning a standard procedure, there are many apps and software solutions on the market that offer such services to you. Here is the list of things to consider before making your choice.
Output Quality
The desired quality of output depends on your needs, of course, but the idea is that the cloned voice has a natural sound. While everybody on the market promises human-like digital voices that get the nuances of your voice right, checking for quality before you commit to the specific provider is a good idea. If the company doesn’t have any samples on its website, request a demo.
Intuitive Interface
Is it easy to use the app? How intuitive is the user interface? Will you be able to figure it out on your own? To determine this, watch the app’s product videos and demos.
Voice Protections
When you clone your voice, the most important consideration is the protection of your data. You want to be sure that the copy of your voice is securely stored and that the company that cloned it does not use it for any other purposes. Make sure that the company/application you choose subscribes to the ethical use of voices and guarantees protection of your data.
The Future of Voice Cloning Technology
The future of voice cloning technology is unfolding as we speak. Powered by the deep learning neural networks, the cloned voices can already voice the texts in languages other than original. The number of languages such voices can cover will grow, as will the accuracy. Soon, we can expect the cloned voices to be able to voice texts in other languages without accents.
In addition to dubbing movies, voicing over corporate and entertainment content, and being used in educational settings, the cloned voices can power personal virtual assistants and “man” the customer service call centers. There are applications in gaming and interactive storytelling as well.
Vidby Expertise
The company’s founders and experts have over 10 years of experience in working with speech technology and AI. Vidby is YouTube’s Recommended Vendor for AI-powered content localization. It has rolled out a library of more than 2,500 AI-generated voices in 75 languages. Its R&D team is actively working on speech synthesis-related issues to make the synthesized speech as nuanced and emotional as human one.
Vidby’s voice-cloning tool is cross lingual. It means that after cloning your voice, you can use the company’s services to voice over your videos in eight languages (with 20+ more coming very soon). The company subscribes to all the rules of ethical conduct in regards to AI and voice technology, which means that your cloned voice is safe with them.
Conclusion
For 25 years, voice cloning has been a gated technology that required skills and hardware that were beyond the reach of regular users. The AI advances of recent years have broken that dam, making AI-powered voice cloning available to virtually anyone. What seemed like science fiction a couple of decades ago, has now become a reality for millions of people. Voice cloning offers new opportunities in many content-heavy industries, from education to gaming. There are other advantages as well. However, AI voice cloning is a double-edged sword because its proliferation raises concerns of ethical use, data privacy, and authenticity. Navigating the new terrain to avoid the pitfalls and reap the benefits will be an uneasy journey – but the potential prize at the end of the road will be a complete overhaul of human-to-human and human-to-computer communication.