Some Interesting AI Capabilities and Restrictions
While it is easy to clone voices online, there are restrictions in place when it comes to political figures. What is interesting is that these restrictions haven’t stopped anyone.
The awkward phone call with Vice President Kamala Harris and supposed Joe Biden raised many questions. For years we have heard prank phone calls from celebrities, and while there are some excellent deep fakes of Joe Biden out there, it does beg the question why Biden couldn’t appear via video conference. The only thing we heard was his voice, and some stilted sentences.
We have been interested in AI as a tool for analyzing trends and demographics, that has been a huge part of our work on Severed Conscience, but voice cloning with AI is quite interesting. On our podcasts on Spreaker and Spotify which are audio only, we use AI as a tool to remove background noise and raise speaking volumes so that all speakers have a similar quality that is suitable for listening with the benefit of our video. But cloning is offered on most platforms, some free and others for $5 per month. For some of the promos for Behind Enemy Lines we have used AI to clone Spock / Leonard Nimoy, Tony Soprano / James Gandolfini, and Boyd Crowder / Walton Goggins. This article will run you through the steps and show you that it is merely a copy and paste operation once you have a voice sample. It’s not a tutorial, just a quick overview of how easy it is.
Analysis of the phone call reportedly detected that ElevenLabs was used to clone Biden’s speech. When I tried to use a sample of Biden’s voice, a warning immediately appeared regarding the using of political figures. So within the timeframe of 30-60 seconds that it took to upload a sample of Biden, I was presented with a warning. Clearly ElevenLabs has an impressive capability and flagged my sample immediately.
Does this mean that Biden’s voice was not cloned? No, it’s very likely that his voice was, as there are many open source platforms that you can download and use privately to clone a voice. I have done that with the Nimoy voice. And do you think that the team guarding Joe during his Covid bought would leave their trails by clicking “Verify Voice” and leave a record?
Cloning your voice, however, is quite simple. Depending on the quality of the recording, it can be done with less than 30 seconds. After you have uploaded the sample and it is analyzed, you only need to supply the text. Below I use a sample from our last podcast to show that it’s amazingly simple.
Here you type what you want, then you select the voice:
First Tony Soprano reads our script, then Boyd Crowder delivers a fiery sermon style introduction like he preached in Justified. Amazing results for just a few dollars.