Chance Townsend reports on Mashable that James Earl Jones signs over rights to voice of Darth Vader to be replaced by AI.
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He refers to a Deadline article by Caroline Frost, titled James Earl Jones Signs Over Rights To Voice Of Darth Vader, Signalling Retirement From Legendary Role.
She in turn refers to a much more interesting Vanity Fair article by Anthony Breznican titled Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine.
The real story here is about Respeecher, the tech company that has managed to make computer-generated voices sound human.
From their FAQ:
“Why is STS (speech to speech) different from TTS (text to speech)?
The difference between the two is significant. A few important limitations text to speech has:
- In most cases, TTS provides non-natural, robotic emotions. AI doesn’t know where to take emotions from, so it tries to generate them based on the text alone.Very limited control over emotions. Some TTS can make the converted voice sound sad or excited using text annotation. But it is hard to manually encode intricacies of human acting using these annotations alone.
- Words only. TTS are based on dictionaries. Unknown words and abbreviations pose a significant problem. Natural speech contains lots of non-verbal content as well. TTS struggles to render that.
- Most TTS systems face challenges with low-resource languages due to higher data requirements.
- The Respeecher voice cloning system works solely in the acoustic domain. We convey all the emotions and sounds of the source speaker while converting their timbre and other subtle variations into the target speaker.“
Audition the almost 70 voices in the Voice Marketplace.
They even have a program for Small Creators and will accept pitches from interesting projects.
Here’s a glimpse of their online interface:
My take: well, that’s it. Along with deep fakes, now you can’t trust anything you hear either. I guess that leaves “real life” as the one thing you can trust — most of the time, that is. Maybe we are living in a simulation after all….