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Lyrebird Claims It Can Recreate Anyone's Voice Based On Just a 1 Minute Sample (theverge.com)
Artem Tashkinov writes: Today, a Canadian artificial intelligence startup named Lyrebird unveiled its voice imitation deep learning algorithm that can mimic a person's voice and have it read any text with a given emotion, based on the analysis of just a few dozen seconds of audio recording. The website features samples using the recreated voices of Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. A similar technology was created by Adobe around a year ago but it requires over 20 minutes of recorded speech. The company sets to open its APIs to the public, while the computing for the task will be performed in the cloud.
Goodbye, voice actors.
Film actors, you're next.
If this true I imagine Hollywood would jump on this -- they now have one less reason to be inconvenienced when an (popular) actor dies.
Someone uses a reconstruction of someone else's popular, but now dead voice, as a marketing ploy -- much like Natalie Cole hijacked her father's song -- are we going to have lawsuits over unauthorized sound-a-likes now?
I also imagine the music industry would go crazy over it as well. First with their Auto-Tune shenanigans I'm now waiting for the inevitable "Auto-Sing" -- "we can recreate the voice of any dead singer!"
gets their hands on this. With photorealistic CGI and manufactured voices, they can manufacture any recorded situation and evidence they want, and pass it off as real.
I think we will eventually reach a point in the world where every person of notability has a private encryption key, and any statement or appearance they make will be signed so people know what is real and what is not.
This is true in the same way that auto-tune removes the need for musical singing ability. Sure, you can force a certain note, but it sounds artificial. Similarly this tool can replicate a voice at standard timbres and emotions well enough to be recognizable, but not well enough to be undetectable as a digital emulation.
It's not until it's undetectable (such as some of the best modern CGI) that we'll actually have made actors obsolete. Except... amazingly, CGI costs more than the actors, it's less flexible, and slower. I think it will be quite a while before we have something that is both on-par for quality and cheaper than a skilled live human.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Hello, i am the system administrator. My voice is my password, verify me.