With the buzz surrounding generative AI, it’s easy to get lost in the hype without understanding the technology and how to benefit from employing it. Generative AI is providing accessibility and enhances many different tasks. Some of the most popular applications of generative AI are text-to-image and text-to-video. Similar to these use cases, our text-to-speech and speech-to-speech models have grown increasingly popular. In this article, we’re going to focus on the basics of generative voice AI. We’ll discuss how AI voice cloning works, how to clone your voice, and how enterprise customers are deploying it.
What Is AI Voice Cloning?
AI Voice cloning is the process of creating a synthetic replica of a person’s voice through machine learning and speech synthesis technology. The objective of AI voice cloning is to achieve a high level of naturalness that sounds exactly like a person’s voice. You may ask, why would you want to clone someone’s voice? There are many use cases for voice cloning including the creation of personalized voice assistants, chatbots, video game characters, animated film avatars, custom call center voices, and much more. Before we jump into how AI voice cloning works let’s look at a brief history of voice cloning.
The Brief History of AI Voice Cloning
To most people’s surprise, voice cloning isn’t a new phenomenon. It dates back to the early days of computing. Below are some milestones in the development of voice cloning software and technology over the last 100 years:
- In 1968, capable of generating digitized speech from written text the IBM’s Shoebox machine is introduced in San Jose, California (Silicon Valley).
- In the 1980s, the first commercial speech synthesis products, including the DECtalk and the MacinTalk were released.
- The 1990s, gave way to the introduction of neural networks and machine learning algorithms leading to significant improvements in the quality and naturalness of synthesized speech.
- In 2016, WaveNet, was introduced by Google’s DeepMind team that was a deep learning model that could generate raw audio waveforms producing realistic speech and music using text-to-speech.
- In 2017, the Google AI research team delivered Tacotron an AI-powered speech synthesis team that converted text-to-speech.
- Most recently, in 2021 BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) a language understanding model (Natural Language Understanding) was developed by Google AI Language and improved NLP (Natural Language Processing) tasks by pre-training on a large amount of text data.
Historical timeline of AI Voice Cloning.
How Does AI Voice Cloning Work?
AI voice cloning is a complex process that involves audio data, an algorithm to train on the data, and finally fine-tuning your cloned AI voice. Initially, our AI model will require audio data for the machine learning process to trigger. There are two primary ways to share audio data with our model which include uploading an audio file of 20+ minutes or recording voice samples in our app.
The recorded or uploaded audio data is then analyzed by our model to extract various acoustic features, such as pitch, tone, and rhythm. Once the voice is recorded, the speech synthesis begins. The analyzed audio is used to train a speech synthesis model, such as a neural network. The model is trained on this data to pick up on the nuances and acoustic features of the user’s voice.
Once the voice is cloned, the user has the option to continue refining the AI voice with various voice augmenting variables such as prosody, phoneme, and emotions. Our app offers an unparalleled amount of options to give users complete control over the fine-tuning process in order to achieve the most natural version of their target voice.
AI voice cloning process; audio upload to cloned AI voice.
How To Clone Your Voice With Resemble AI
The videos below are walkthroughs of our seamless AI voice cloning process. The primary voice cloning processes involve either recording voice samples in our app (video on left) or uploading an audio file of a user’s voice (video on right). If you do choose to clone your voice by recording voice samples below are best practices to consider.
- Record in a quiet setting with no background noise or echo.
- Use a high-quality, external microphone. Avoid recording with your computer mic.
Clone your voice by recording voice samples.
Clone your voice by uploading audio file(s).
How Enterprise Customers Are Taking Advantage of AI Voice Cloning
As we’ve discussed, voice cloning is not a new phenomenon rather it’s being adopted at a rapid rate with the widespread adoption of generative AI. With generative voice AI tools like Resemble AI’s voice cloning software, enterprise customers are becoming more efficient and their creativity with voice has become nearly limitless. Below are sample use cases of our enterprise customers taking advantage of generative AI voices in unique ways to enhance their content and create those workflow efficiencies.
- Marketing use cases with Paramount, NBC Universal and DreamWorks Animation.
- Film Production with Netflix’s Andy Warhol Diaries.
- Video Dubbing (translating and localizing audio)
Finally, keep an eye out for a follow-up article where we will walk you through how to generate custom AI voice content with text-to-speech and speech-to-speech conversion. This is where synthetic speech is generated from the analyzed audio data through our text-to-speech or speech-to-speech models which convert written text or spoken audio into synthetic speech. Look forward to catching you soon.
To learn more about how you can get started with our enterprise voice cloning software and generative voice AI click the button below to schedule a demo with one our team members.
