I’m on a quest
My crippling addiction to short YouTubes continues. I’ve noticed more and more channels are using what are clearly AI generated voiceovers.
They’re pretty good, actually. They inflect well and very rarely make mistakes – but when they do, they’re doozies no English speaker would make. “Dee-butt” for “debut” is my favorite so far.
I figured out they were AI because so many different channels had the same narrator. David Attenborough is the most obvious one. He must be thrilled about that – I wonder why he doesn’t take action.
There’s one particular American English speaker with a mild hispanic accent who is for some reason drafted to do voiceovers for multiple police bodycam footage channels (yes, I’m still watching those). For no particular reason, I’ve been plodding around the internet trying to find it.
I feel like we’re old friends. I wouldn’t mind making him say “good morning” or “welcome home” to me.
In my defense, the cat has been sprawled across my lap all afternoon and there’s not much else I could do.
If you want to play with them, there are dozens, including:
FakeYou (really?) lets you type a sentence and try it out. It’s slow and locked up on me once. “Eric” is indeed Cartman. Pro tip: short sentences render faster but don’t sound like anyone in particular.
Topmediai says you can sample 3,200 voices, but only gave me Benedict Cumberbatch. I think they may be the source of the David Attenborough voice.
Invideo takes your single sentence and generates a whole video, voiceover and all. I wonder if people are really trying to climb YouTube or TikTok with robot videos. This is going to shit up the internet really badly.
I got started down this rabbit hole by a Twitter ad for Speechelo. For a mere £47 you can have all the voices in the picture above. One language and multiple voices I can see, but multiple voices and multiple languages? Who needs that?
If you visit their website, you’ll see they use a little pop-up provided by a software company called Provely. “Increase Your Conversions by 30% to 400% by Adding Real-Time Social Proof, Scarcity, Urgency, and Credibility to Your Website.” Sneaky bastiches.
In this case, there’s a rolling pop-up with the name of someone who has just bought Speechelo. If you watch long enough, the names repeat.
Yes, I watched it that long. What?
July 8, 2024 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 4