This week I visited neural.love, a multi-purpose AI site with a focus on images, video and sound...
In this aptly named "episode" you join me as I conduct AI casting for an important Voiceover performance. We shall call him "Blogman", and he will be the voice of the Marketing Next blog.
For this challenge I looked at Replica Studios (https://replicastudios.com/) This AI platform requires a download of their app. The premise behind Replica is that by using hundreds of hours of human acting, they are moving beyond the stilted, synthetic-y sounds of text-to-voice apps to produce ones that not only mirror human tone and cadence, but across ages, gender, accents and emotional tone.
I of course needed a Northern English male voice, but by setting too many parameters, realized there was in fact only one such voice in the library. The character, named "Ranger" was, er, "capturing the spirit of John Snow from Game of Thrones", shall we say?
Having established the character, I felt that my test script should be in-keeping with the genre while at the same time speaking to our quest to find the best AI tools:
Ranger (in "Battle" tone): "There's an army of AI apps headed this way. If we don't work out which ones are usable in marketing by nightfall, the world of business for men and women will end."
The resulting voiceover is, good. Not great....yet. The Replica team has certainly overcome some of the biggest issues with AI voices. But there's still something slightly off about the read, and a couple of words are spoken (including "AI") as if the system just never got a sample in the correct tone/context.
If you'd like to hear the read, please go here:
