This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
NotebookLM, Google's notetaking tool, has an AI-generated voice feature that is surprisingly close to a real voice.
Close does not equal the same. It's actually clear that it's a different voice if you compare both. This guy's wants to own the whole spectrum, this is dumb.
Can't wait to get my YouTube videos taken down because I sound similar to some guy.
Hopefully it's apparent to all parties involved that the machine designed to commit plagiarism and launder that plagiarism through plausible deniability, should be treated with the highest amount of suspicion possible.
Or more simply put, "If you didn't steal his voice, Sundar Pichai, where did you get it from?"
They say they used a paid actor. Of course, even if that's true, it's not particularly hard to find someone with a similar pitch, accent, and timbre, and then finish fixing it to make sure it's as confidently soothing as the NPR voice you wanted to steal in the first place. I suppose in one sense it's not utterly different from hiring a soundalike, but now the soundalike is damn near perfect (the clips in the article are VERY similar and feel more like the difference in recording equipment than anything else) and doesn't need to actually be available to perform for new impressions. Yet another example of "withstand motion for summary judgment, string it out, lobby against future guiderails" as the totality of Silicon Valley's legal philosophy.
Don't worry they didn't steal his voice, they stole thousands of voices and combined them into one voice that sounds like that one guy. Very different
