Voices.ai Is Here - IS the AI Voices Sky Falling?
Note: Late the day before I published this video and post, David Ciccerelli published the following announcement. https://www.voices.com/blog/voices-ai-what-the-acquisition-means-to-you-and-the-industry/
I did not receive it in time to respond to it in this video.
Well, it finally happened. The worst kept secret in the history of voiceover has finally come to pass. If if you didn't see this one coming, folks, I don't know what to tell you. And I have other bad news. The sun will set tonight, again.
David Ciccerelli and Voices have finally launched their AI voices platform unshockingly called Voices.ai.
It's like that lump of coal you've known for years you're going to get in your stocking. But all the while, Santarelli has been telling you what a good girl you are, and you always knew that coal car was going to come back and up your driveway with a big black nugget with your name on it.
Well, it's here. Let's get to it and let's break it down.
First, it's not here. Not really. If you click the sign up button, you'll notice that they're just taking names for a wait list, names of buyers, ostensibly. So they haven't really launched the actual service yet. But obviously the site is up and running. Most likely by the time you see this video, the site and the service will have launched in earnest.
Let's take a look at the site and start to break this thing down. Let's start at the top.
"Voices.ai. The new website for AI Voices, voice cloning, and TTS or text to speech."
So for clarity, let's break these three terms apart a little bit and clarify them. AI voices is typically a search term that an AI voice buyer is going to enter into Google to be able to find sites like Voices.AI. Makes complete sense that they would use that term.
Secondly, voice cloning is the AI generation of a synthetic voice made from samples of an actual human voice, in most cases a voice actor. And text to speech refers to the voice generation by a AI from text that is fed into a particular application.
"Voices.AI is the best AI voice developer platform for running, cloning and deploying A.I. voices at scale."
So here's where we start to get a sense of just who they're targeting this site to. These are companies that have a lot of work to be done at scale. I think that, yes, this will take some work from human voice talent, that is, to be sure there's no getting around it. But I also think that AI will scoop up a lot of work that maybe human voice actors were never going to get a shot at anyway.
And this is where I think there's a legitimate business case and scenario where AI can do clients a huge service, things like encyclopedic catalogs and titles of, especially, nonfiction audiobooks, things that were a prohibitively expensive to have a human voice. The production houses are already stretched thin. They don't have the time to manage and coordinate and produce oodles and oodles of back product catalog.
And speaking for myself, for the encyclopedic, more data-driven things that will be put to an AI voice... If I had to read that crap all day, I'd eat a buckshot sundae.
But let's take a breath. The sky is not falling, friends. We're not playing Chicken Little here,
Scrolling down...
"Why you will love our development platform" As an AI voice generator development platform, we help organizations create voice overs at scale..." There's that phrase again. "...using natural human like voices accessible through APIs."
Human LIKE? Yes. Then there are four feature/benefit cards below.
The first of those is "Branding. Choose from a dozen of cloned voices, odd phrasing created by professional voice actors, including Voicey Award winners."
The Voicey Awards? Swear to God, I had to look it up.
The Voicey awards apparently are a fabrication of Voices.com given to their top performers. Right? All awards are made up. I get it. But these are the awards... and not a whole lot of people have heard of apparently... that go to the Voices.com top performers and I assume from that that they are working with those top performers, about a dozen of them, to create a pilot program for their cloned voice offering.
I find it a little odd that they're using Branding as the header for their cloned voice offering, but whatever. So if those top talent are indeed working with Voices.ai, from Voices.com, to come to an agreement to use their voices as the cloned voice offering, I assume that they're aware that this has happened and that they're actively participating in these agreements.
And I hope to God, with every fiber of my being that those actors are being justly and fairly and reasonably compensated for that service. Why do I suspect that that's not the case? I also assume that this is in fact a pilot, that they're starting with only 12 or so talent and that this offering will be expanded to other voice talent and you'll be able to make a clone of many more voices in the future.
That's my assumption.
Next... "Voice Design. Design the perfect voice by picking from the most popular vocal archetypes that emotionally connect with audiences."
Flag on the play: untruthful use of the phrase "emotionally connect with audiences."
Goddammit, David, this is the thing.... This speaks to the heart of what we do as voice actors.
And I don't think you care that we're pissed. I think you already know and you've proven you don't care. But when you hold this up to the world and you say “this as this good is what you guys do,” you're speaking to the very heart and the core of our art.
And if that's true, David, then you damn well be better paying these voice actors that you're working with a fair, reasonable and professional rate by their standards, not by yours.
The fact is, AI right now cannot emotionally connect with audiences.
And I want to talk to the voice buyers here, because until that point happens, when AI truly does emotionally connect with an audience and is indistinguishable from a human voice and a human performance, then your brand, if you use an AI voice, is going to take a reputational hit every time you use an AI voice.
Moving on...
"Voice Generator. Convert written text into spoken language enabling voice applications or accessibility features for visually impaired users. "
And the final feature/benefit card, "APIs. Our APIs for dynamic content, where voice needs to be produced in real time, such as public service announcements."
Again, this is where I think there's a legitimate use case for AI for things like applications where speech will be generated, as they say in real time, meaning it's not pre-written.
You can't pull a human voice actor into a studio to record the words because they haven't been written yet. They're being written by the application by the AI on the fly. Where we can benefit as voice actors is by licensing, with proper protections, our voices to be those voices that are generating those spontaneous speech content
Awful grammar. Moving on...
"Why will you choose our AI platform? Lifelike Voices. Voices.ai leverages advanced deep learning technologies to produce high quality, natural sounding speech."
Does AI sound like a human being now? Yes. Have they perfected that part of the equation? Absolutely.
"Customizable. Voices.ai supports Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), which enables developers to control aspects like pitch speed and volume, further improving the user experience."
And this to me is key. There is a man behind the curtain. We will call him [non-gender specific] a buyer, and that buyer will have levers like pitch, speed, and cadence, right? I defy any developer, any client to be able to as adeptly as a voice actor does, be able to communicate real and appropriate human emotion to give a moving, connecting performance.
Because the reality is if they could do it, they'd already be an actor.
Think about mocap, right? When mocap came along that gave actors a tool to be able to communicate human in motion through the body, to translate that communication to film.
Now, I remember the early days of web development, because I'm old. Applications like Dreamweaver came along and site builders like Wix and Squarespace and so on, and folks, we're not sitting in a world where there are scads of web developers out of work.
Those tools, in effect, enabled clients to be able to take the low hanging fruit themselves. It was uninteresting work to real web developers, and at the same time it forced those developers to get better at what they do because those applications and site builders and what have you do a lot of the the the grunt work, right?
And in that way, that's what AI is going to be in our business. A bit of a palate cleanser. It will take a lot of the work away that we didn't enjoy and didn't pay well in the first place.
And the competition among the sites like Voice123, Voices.com, Upwork, Fiverr, etc.... J Michael Collins over the weekend made a great point that the competition among those sites has prevented thus far, and probably always will, one monopoly, one monolith from rising up and dictating to the rest of the world what voiceover rates will be because they have all the work. That has not happened.
I ultimately believe that a number of things are going to happen, and most of them fairly quickly.
Number one, AI will accelerate the pace of change in our business. That's already started to happen.
Number two, and I've said this before, I think AI is going to wipe out the entire bottom end of our business. Things like IVR, things like... I call it compliance driven corporate training or government training... things where organizations just have to check a box and get it done and they really don't care about how good it is and the quality.
Yes, that stuff is going to go to AI. That's part of that palate cleansing that I was talking about before. Things like back, especially nonfiction, audio book titles that not only would be prohibitively expensive to bring in human voice actors to voice, but quite frankly, most of the production houses are stretched thin in the first place. They don't have the time or the bandwidth to be able to manage and coordinate and produce tons and tons and tons of back catalog material.
I think there's a great use case for AI in those cases. Again, if we're smart and we have the right protections and we're financially protected, that may be a way for us to get work that we weren't going to get in the first place.
And number three, the divide, the gap between on one hand new voice talent and on the other hand established experience talent... that gap is going to widen to a chasm and it's going to be harder and harder and harder for new talent to be able to make that leap and become experienced and become established. AI is going to widen that gap.
Now, if you keep going down the page on Voices.ai there's also an FAQ talking about features and vaguely about pricing.
There's a blog with, right now, three nauseating posts and of course, the sign up page for the wait lists. That's the whole site right now. I'm actually surprised that there are no samples on the site, especially given the fact that it looks like they're going to start voice cloning with a dozen voice actors. That seems to be a pretty easy thing to do on the site. For whatever reason, they haven't done it.
My guess is that they may not want to tip their hand to re her and re speech and speech hello and resembled dot a I and did I say speech if I and Microsoft and Amazon, Google Apple, the list goes on and on and on and on of competitors they meaning voices that I may not want to tip their hand just yet until they start selling the service. But you know, who knows?
So, some other thoughts...
first, you can get as angry as you want at David Ciccerelli and Voices.ai and I agree with you that the man, by all appearances, is bereft of ethics. He's duplicitous. He talks out of both sides of his mouth, and his only real goal seems to be simply enriching himself.
While I agree with all of that, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to rail at David Ciccerelli and Voices.ai because if it's not him.... Look, I just named a bunch of their competitors. If it's not him and Voices.ai, it's going to be somebody else coming after our work.
It's happening, kids. AI is here. We've got to deal with it.
I said it last week. I'll say it again this week. We can either cower from it and rail against it. And people like Ciccerelli or we can embrace it and learn to leverage it to our own ends and to be able to keep the art in voice over. And finally, railing at Ciccerrelli and Voices.ai is not going to go back in time and change the fact that hundreds of thousands of voice actors, I'm one of them at one time, signed Voices.com's terms of service.
And if you need a reminder of what you signed, here it is.
“Each User grants to Voices (and any third party authorized by Voices) an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, unrestricted, fully paid up, royalty free, non-exclusive right and license to reproduce, copy, publish, perform in public, communicate to the public by telecommunication, disseminate, optimize (including search engine optimization), synchronize with other content and materials, edit, translate, transcribe, close caption and otherwise store, use and process all User Generated Content (in whole or in part, as is or as may be edited) and any materials based upon or derived therefrom for the purpose of providing the Services, promoting Voices, its services and the Site. User hereby waives all moral rights (and all other rights of a like or similar nature) that User may have in the User Generated Content in favor of Voices (and any third party authorized by Voices to use such User Generated Content).”
So the question to you is: Are you going to continue to support this enterprise?
For more information on the VO Freedom Master Plan, click this link. To get my Move Touch Inspire newsletter for voice actors every Thursday, click this link. And if you haven't heard, I'm now offering Private 1:1 VO Business Coaching. You can get that link here.
Thank you for the conversations we have both here on the channel and in the voiceover community at large, both nationally and internationally.
The more we talk, the more we communicate, the more we have rational, well thought out discussion and exchange information, and the stronger we stand together, the better off we will be moving forward.
Thank you for contributing to this and all the conversations. Thank you for your support and we will see you back here again next week.