13134: One Category Of VO Has Been “Under Attack” By AI For Decades. And It’s Doing Just Fine.

Raw transcript:

in another episode of this podcast I
mentioned
that there is a category of voice over
work that has been dealing
with one of the biggest most Monumental
changes in our business
uh for quite a while for decades
actually uh going back to the 80s late
80s early 90s
and it’s a category that I uh love and
it may be a template
for what we can expect and what we
should be watchful for in the future and
yes I’m talking about artificial
intelligence and synthetic voices let’s
talk about all this in this episode of
the vo Heroes podcast
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the category of voiceover work that I’m
talking about is interactive voice
response or ivr and just in a nutshell
I’ve been doing ivr for a long time most
of my life
phone trees and prompts and recorded
messages when you call big companies
um and it kind of gets lost in
everything but a lot of people think
that synthetic voices
is a relatively new phenomena and in
some cases it is certainly the massive
awareness of artificial intelligence and
its role in synthetic voices
has been garnering a great deal of
coverage both in you know typical media
Electronic media performance media
and as it ties into sites like Chachi PT
and 11 labs and other sites capable of
creating new content out of simple
requests or very little voice training
to to imitate voices
it can be thought of by some people as a
relatively new phenomena but the truth
is
even when synthetic voices were clearly
synthetic like worse than Siri or
Cortana or Alexa
worse than even the most 8-bit like for
those of you that remember what 8-bit is
8-bit like uh uh shall we playing a game
you know from war games back in the 80s
there have been projects many many times
since then that have been voiced if you
will
by a computer by some electronic device
and
good to know
it hasn’t killed the category
it has simply been something that exists
so
because I’m still doing ivr work many
many voice talents still doing ivr work
depending on the project depending upon
whether the project has the budget has
the uh the visibility it’s for a company
that is large enough or Forward Thinking
enough or just concerned enough about
their image to use a human voice
it’s not like almost every category or
or every project in the world of ivr is
being done with synthetic voices quite
the contrary it’s more than uh synthetic
voices human voices are being used
and so when you look at that history you
realize oh okay wait a minute
nobody was like uh screaming that the
sky is falling and we’re going to lose
all of our professional uh income and
jobs and future and and we’re gonna have
to go find you know Factory uh assembly
line work because there’s no need for us
anymore in the world of ivr which is a
very expansive although somewhat hidden
category because you don’t see the
results on television you don’t see the
results in a theater or online in the
form of a commercial or a promo or an
explainer video
it’s only visible to Consumers when they
call up a company that has one of these
programs on their phone
uh phone lines so
the point of this is
we’ve been dealing with this in this one
particular category of work for a long
time
and to a degree in other categories of
work as well for slightly less time but
longer than the last I don’t know year
or so that
chat GPT and Ai and synthetic voices has
become such a huge divisive issue for
performers and so what I’d like to
suggest is that we understand that
technology in general is neutral
how the technology is used can be
positive for some negative for others it
can be constructive it can be
destructive
these opportunities with synthetic
voices for Publishers may keep them in
business when the projects that they are
trying to get voiced can’t afford a
human voice because we’ve got some you
know fairly expensive demands in terms
of our time as we should rightly so as
human beings so
here’s my suggestion
we have some evidence some long-term
evidence that synthetic voices don’t
necessarily spell Doom for human voices
in categories including ivr and others
so what I would like to suggest is that
We Be watchful we be cognizant of
advances we be careful about misuse of
the technology we be vigilant both as
union members and non-union members of
the developments in this space
but that we not paralyze ourselves with
that’s it I’m done Doom we’re done and
I’m going to be talking more about this
later this fall
as I’m recording this at the beginning
of Summer of 2023 I’m going to be
talking more about this
when we open registration for vo Heroes
because I want people to understand that
synthetic voices are here to stay
there’s nothing we can do about getting
rid of them we can you know cavalierly
tilted windmills about this as many
people have chosen to do because they’re
very dramatic performers good for them
their choice awesome but I think a
pragmatic approach might be helpful and
especially knowing that
we don’t know what the future will bring
so I just want to kind of ease the fears
that some people have and also raise the
bar on being aware of this stuff moving
forward
uh I don’t even know if that helps but I
I felt like nobody was talking about the
fact that hey we’ve been dealing with
synthetic voices in ivr for a long time
and we’re all still here
so questions about this questions about
uh synthetic voices ivr uh other
categories your future as a performer
pop them in the uh comments below this
video on veoheros.com and let’s talk
about this because I think it’s worth
talking about uh you can uh ask to like
this uh post you can do so by clicking
on the like button you can pound on it
hard until it’s you know unrecognizable
you can hit the notification Bell you
can subscribe to the channel there’s all
kinds of things that you can do actively
with this and I would love if you would
do so you can also share this with other
actors and voice over performers you
think just might be a little bit worried
about their future as performers because
of artificial intelligence and synthetic
voices
and uh and that’s great if you do that
just go up to the address bar grab it
and send it on I’m David H Lawrence the
17th I thank you so much for watching
and for listening to this episode of the
vo Heroes podcast
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(from YouTube)