0082: Let’s Settle On “Synthetic Voices,” Not “AI”

Raw transcript:

the words we choose the phrases that we
select how we describe things
can be
everything and today i want to talk
about
a very important distinction that i
think we as talent need to make between
two phrases
ai artificial intelligence
and
synthetic
content synthetic voices synthetic faces
on this episode of the vo heroes podcast
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i get
that talent everywhere
is likely at the very least concerned
and in some cases scared to death
of
synthetic voices and synthetic faces the
deep fake things that we see
on youtube and on the news at night and
that we’re being presented with in our
industry
uh from companies like deep zen and
speech key and so on
replacing
human voices for things like audio books
and ivr systems and even commercials
you know narration other things i can
see
how that would be stressful
but what’s happening is people are using
the phrase artificial intelligence
as though it’s interchangeable
with the phrase
and i’m just going to deal with
voiceover for right now but the same
thing is applicable to on camera i don’t
want to keep saying synthetic voices and
synthetic faces so i’m just going to say
synthetic voices
and the two are not the same
artificial intelligence is a very
general very large very broad category
of
applying technology to problem solving
to data analysis to data gathering
uh data mining uh machine learning
there’s a huge huge base of things that
artificial intelligence helps us with
and takes care of and it is a technology
that much like others describe
technologies as being neutral neither
positive nor negative just the uses of
them are positive or negative artificial
intelligence is
at least until skynet becomes you know
aware
um it is it is still a neutral
technology
and what happens is
we look at what’s going on with
companies that are either developing
their own forms of synthetic voice
creation using human voices as modeling
using
artificial intelligence and data
analysis to make the voices better over
time
and there’s this collateral damage that
happens
with companies like for example positron
that uses artificial intelligence but
not to create synthetic voices in fact
we worked very hard to make sure
that positron made it clear that’s not
what they want to do
that they’re using artificial
intelligence to make their analysis of
manuscript versus voice
better to help proof
uh material
and you see these arguments going on all
the time on online and even in person i
was at a meetup
and these two guys were just screaming
at each other about artificial
intelligence and what they really were
screaming about was fear
the fear of being replaced
by a digitally created voice
and it’s not artificial intelligence
that is creating that voice oddly enough
it’s being used in general to make those
voices better if a company is really
trying
to become indistinguishable from human
voices but it’s not
artificial intelligence it’s the purpose
of the company that’s creating a
synthetic voice that’s what we need to
deal with we need to deal with
the the notion that yes these things are
are coming down the pike and there’s no
stopping them
uh is it something that may take away
work from human voices absolutely
and it may do so in ways that human
voices want
like nobody wants to be
uh
you know siri nobody wants to be cortana
nobody wants to be alexa
you don’t have the time to do that
nobody has the time to sit there and
talk through somebody’s phone you need
a a synthetic voice to be able to do
that kind of
you know plotting horrifying long-term
work
now do we want that for audiobooks no do
we want that for narration or
commercials no but it’s been happening
in other categories for a long time
things like
toy voices say toy voices six times
really fast or ivr phone systems
there was a bit of a human cry in the
90s and the early 2000s when synthetic
voices started to replace a human voice
um i i
made most of my bones doing ivr work in
the early part of my career
but it never struck me as something that
would be a permanent replacement i still
do ivr work as a human voice because
some companies want that some companies
can’t afford that
so
my overarching
goal with this episode of the podcast is
to make sure that we make a clean
distinction
between the general technology of
artificial intelligence and how it works
in many many ways on our computers on
our smartphones in standalone devices
and the learning that goes on to make
those things better
versus the one specific application
of synthetic media voices faces deep
fakes etc
absolutely we need to talk about that
and i would be concerned if you weren’t
aware of the potential threat
and competition to a human voice and a
human face i mean you’ve seen you’ve
seen tom cruise doing stand-up comedy
that he never said you watched the
anthony bourdain uh you know documentary
where they they uh you know
synthetically uh rendered his voice
and
that wasn’t necessarily a function of
artificial intelligence it was just a
a series of code bases that listened to
what he sounded like and then spit out a
version of that that was pretty
indistinguishable from the original um
so please let’s not be piling on to
artificial intelligence or
throwing out the potential that
artificial intelligence has to help us
because of the threat that we feel from
synthetic voices okay so artificial
intelligence over here synthetic voices
over here please please let me know what
you think i know there’s gonna be
somebody who posts in the comments and
says i don’t know what i’m talking about
but i actually do
i really do honest to god i’ve been
doing technology for decades
and i’ve been doing entertainment and
performance for decades and i’ve seen
this happen over and over and over again
people scared of new technology remember
when digital audio workstations were
brand new people were like i’ll never
give up my razer blades and my my
reel-to-reel tape okay all right great
okay whatever and now nobody
nobody
cares nobody’s working in analog that
i’m aware of although i could
let me know what you think in the
comments below and i mean on voheros.com
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see you in the next episode of the
podcast i’m david h lawrence the 17th i
thank you so much for watching and for
listening and we will see you very very
soon
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