Voice cloning has the potential to revolutionize our approach to education, business, and leisure time. Here’s how you can do it too.
Unlike actual cloning, voice cloning is safe, easy to get a hang of, and available to pretty much everyone with an internet connection. What’s more, it’s not only practical but useful too, revolutionizing the way we approach education, business, video games, literature, and everything else under the sun. Want to give it a go? Stick around!
What’s voice cloning?
Voice cloning is exactly what you imagine it to be — replicating and generating an individual’s voice via artificial intelligence (AI). It might sound like some sci-fi business, but we are sure you’ve already had some experience with it. Remember that text to speech (TTS) program you used to play around with, making it read news for you in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice? That’s an example of voice cloning.
Simple TTS browser extensions and apps are not as sophisticated and potent when it comes to voice cloning. Of course, they shouldn’t be since that is not their main goal. Proper voice cloning solutions go much deeper in their speech pattern analyses, which lets them focus on pinpointing and making use of all the details that make one’s voice unique. As you can guess, more comprehensive feedback means more authentic AI voices and more advanced machine learning.
Uses of voice cloning
Voice cloning is more than a gimmick and has plenty of uses in education, business, medicine, etc. Of course, as with literal cloning, there are some ethical questions bound to come up (just think about those deepfakes that have been leaking). But we’ll leave philosophical debates for another day and try looking at the bright side.
Education
Education has been, slowly but steadily, moving over to the digital realm. We’re not here to discuss what kind of consequences that might have on the education system but rather to point out a simple fact — screens and Zoom calls are replacing classrooms and chalkboards.
That means we have plenty of resources at our disposal that we can utilize to make our lectures more engaging and entertaining. With voice cloning, for example, we can use deep learning to replicate the voices of historical figures. Imagine listening to Nikola Tesla explain alternate current to you.
Audiobooks
Next up, we’ve got audiobooks. Although we think of them as educational tools and a means of relaxation, audiobooks are much more important than that. For some people, they are the only way of interacting with the written word, especially the visually impaired.
With voice cloning technology, we can transform audiobooks into something way more entertaining and engaging.
Text to speech services
Before we see how real-time voice cloning and speech synthesis works, let’s return to TTS programs for a moment and see how good of a job they can do. For example, let’s take a look at Speechify, one of the most sophisticated TTS solutions available.
What can Speechify do? Speechify can turn any text into audio files, it can scan physical documents and convert them into speech and it can help you create voiceovers for your blog, etc.
Why are we mentioning all that? Because TTS apps are affordable and accessible, they can not only benefit from voice cloning a lot but also help push voice cloning forward into the mainstream. For example, Speechify has celebrity voices, so you can listen to your favorite novel read by Gwyneth Paltrow. Try it out.
How are AI voices made?
Now, we can go back to the nerdy stuff and tell you how AI voices are actually made and how they manage to sound like human voices. Don’t worry — we won’t make it too complicated.
As we’ve already said, voice cloning AI technology makes use of deep learning to figure out what it is exactly that makes one’s voice their own voice. We’re talking about pitch, tone, accent, loudness, and everything else that we associate with any individual’s voice. As you can imagine, it takes powerful tech to figure all that out; but it is possible.
What is actually important is that we feed the deep neural network lots of audio input. In a way, it is also how we learn foreign languages! Of course, the technology has evolved now, and some solutions only take a few hours to nail the desired voice down, which is fantastic if there’s not enough audio data we can use (remember what we said about historical figures).
Voice Cloning Apps
As you can imagine, there are lots of voice cloning apps out there now that the internet is ubiquitous. Of course, some do a better job than others. Here are some of our top choices that you can use to make your own synthetic voices and harness the full power of speech synthesis from the comfort of your home:
- Respeecher
- Murf
- Resemble
- Descript
Voice Cloning Websites
If you’re familiar with TTS tools, you know that you don’t always have to download apps to get the job done. Instead, you can use browser extensions and websites for a quicker solution. The same goes for AI voice cloning. You can, for example, use something like Zzlab. But, if you want to make the best use of synthetic speech programs, we suggest downloading Speechify or any of the programs we listed above.
FAQ
What is the difference between voice cloning and voice morphing?
The answer is simple: voice morphing is a simple matter of altering one’s voice to make it sound different, that is, putting it through a digital filter of sorts. Voice cloning, on the other hand, is a more complex process involving deep and machine learning with the aim of creating an AI voice capable of producing audio on its own and not merely altering the speaker’s voice in real time.
Who is the easiest person to clone?
The easiest voice model to clone would be the one with the most voice data and audio samples available. For example, you can use your own voice recordings or look for the voices of popular content creators and celebrities because the algorithms already favor them.
