The ultimate guide to voice cloning

Have you ever looked around the internet for recordings of historical figures and celebrities long gone? Have you ever wanted your life narrated by the likes of Richard Burton and James Earl Jones? Okay, maybe you can’t have a voiceover coming out of your ears wherever you go, but you can definitely have your idol read your websites, emails, and articles for you with the help of voice cloning.

What is voice cloning, and how is it used?

What was once a dream is now a reality—we can finally use artificial intelligence, or AI, to analyze and then replicate anyone’s voice.

Of course, voice cloning is not just a fun gag you can use to trick your online friends or on social media with a deepfake video. It can also be a rather handy e-learning tool, for example, by having the voices of real historical figures narrating lectures.

Also, voice cloning can revolutionize the way content creation works. Long gone are the days of robotic AI voices and ear-grating voiceovers. With sophisticated deep-learning tech, you can make professional videos, & podcasts from the comfort of your home.

Further, just think about all the ways voice cloning can help those with speech difficulties or disabilities. Thanks to modern voice cloning technology, we can restore everyone’s ability to talk via assistive tech and sound like themselves instead of relying on primitive and robotic-sounding synthetic voices.

The benefits of voice cloning

Should you need more convincing, you can always look to the more pragmatic benefits of voice cloning.

For one, just think of the dubbing potential. Dubbing is laborious work, and it usually costs a lot due to voice actor rates, especially if we’re talking about A-listers whose voices you’ve come to love on Audible. Thanks to machine learning, however, we can use speech samples to mimic voices and synthesize new audio output to dub movies, shows, ads, and educational material much more quickly.

Further, voice cloning can be a game changer in the business sphere. If you’re dealing with lots of clients, and if they are engaging with your website or content on a regular basis, a high-quality voice cloning solution will make their user experience much more memorable.

Finally, seeing that we’ve just gotten out of a global pandemic, we’ve realized that remote education might actually be the future—and voice cloning apps could take the role of an absent teacher, narrating all the necessary material to students online.

Voice cloning software options

As you can imagine, there are many devs and companies out there chasing the number one spot on the list of most versatile and flexible voice cloning solutions, so it’s easy to get lost in all the options. Luckily, we have a short list of our top picks just below to make your decision-making easier.

Github

First up, we have GitHub. Of course, GitHub is not a voice cloning app per se, but it has loads of custom-made data sets for speech synthesis, text to speech (TTS), as well as voice cloning solutions. If you’re a bit tech-savvy, GitHub is a real treasure chest of possibilities waiting to be explored.

Podcastle.ai

Podcastle is a proper voice-editing kit as it lets you dabble in multi-track recording, editing, mixing, audio transcription, etc. Most importantly for us, though, it lets you play around with voice cloning, and it’ll do the job even if you’re not an audio-editing expert.

Resemble.ai

Third up, we have Resemble. This app prides itself on its voice supercharging features and excellent real-time APIs that will transform your audio-editing experience. What’s more, it lets you blend human and synthetic voices for some pretty sick effects! Now you can mix your own voice with someone else’s and sound like someone—or something—straight out of those early sci-fi flicks.

Veritone

Now, Veritone goes beyond voice cloning and does all sorts of things with artificial intelligence. We won’t get into all the cyberpunk details, but rest assured that their voice cloning solutions are realistic, customizable, and based on more sophisticated neural networks and speech analysis algorithms.

Descript.com

Descript is another all-around tool that will do wonders for your productivity, no matter whether you’re making a podcast, editing videos, recording your screen, or working on transcribing something. Of course, it features rather impressive voice cloning features, and it even comes with a bunch of stock voices for you to check out.

Speechify

Speechify does not provide voice cloning just yet but is the leading text to speech solution for all devices and browsers. The premium subscription comes with a host of celebrity voices and accents.

One of Speechify’s premium voices includes actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg, and Mr. President.

Things to consider before creating your voice clone

If you’ve checked out some of our suggestions above, you’ve probably realized that voice cloning is often not that easy. We’re not talking about ethical issues associated with it, although that is also an important factor. We’re talking about actual mixing and editing, as well as speech samples and voice recording analyses.

Sure, the difficulty will depend on the software you’ve picked, but some folks often find themselves overwhelmed no matter what they choose, especially if they’re new to real-time voice cloning. In other words, you’d ideally be looking for an AI voice generator that’s intuitive, comes with proper tutorials, and lets you make slow advancements on your journey to becoming a professional custom voice maker.

Fortunately, there are apps that are just that. Speechify, for example, is first and foremost a reading assistance tool that can also be used for voice cloning purposes. In other words, it’s got accessibility down to a fine art. It also works with languages other than English, so you won’t have any issues learning the ropes.

Further, Speechify not only offers natural-sounding human voices, but it’s also super flexible. It works with audio files of WAV and MP3 format, it features OCR features, and it works on everything from Microsoft to Mac to Linux.

Finally, with Speechify, you won’t have to worry about unfair pricing either. The app comes in both free and premium versions, and if you opt for the latter, you’ll see that you won’t find a more professional voice synthesis solution for the same price elsewhere. Consider giving Speechify a try today for your text to speech, and voice synthesis needs.