How AI advancement into text-to-speech technology will impact social media and the voice over industry.
Text-to-speech AI has benefitted people in a host of ways: increasing accessibility to written content for people with vision impairments, allowing people with heavy workloads to multitask while they listen to the content they need to study, and helping those learning a new language with pronunciation as they read. In the past few decades, AI voices had remained robotic and could easily be identified as synthetic, but recent developments have made it possible to replicate the intricacies of human voices – from short breaths in between sentences to emotion and intonation, making many AI voice clips almost indistinguishable from real ones.
Utilizing AI voices for professional AI avatar production can certainly impact the voice over industry and other industries positively. For voice actors, small alterations that would be too costly to redo in a recording booth can be generated instantly, and for meetings and livestreams, the ability to quickly translate and generate speech in other languages can increase accessibility. Modifications can also quickly be made to advertisements or company showreels that require updated information as soon as possible.
However, many voice actors have touched upon how signing over your voice’s rights to AI can impact the ongoing consent that is usually respected in traditional recordings.
While voice acting done completely through AI can be a great way for creators with lower budgets to make art, voice actors have raised concerns about the ways in which the technology could be abused. When you read through a script and find a line you disagree with, you can refuse to say it, but with AI, new contracts will have to be made to ensure your voice is only being used on lines you have explicitly agreed on, yet there’s the potential for your voice to be used in projects you’re completely unaware of. Benefits that come from collaborating with voice actors such as improv, direction and spontaneity are also lost on AI that for now only offer simple variants on a sentence – such as the choice between a “happy” or “sad” emotion.
The use of AI audio for social media engagement has also changed significantly with the introduction of realistic text-to-speech technology. AI voices have been commonplace on TikTok since its debut, giving creators who don’t want to or can’t record their voice the ability to share stories audibly and make engaging content. But with the ability to plug in celebrity voices, especially those who haven’t consented to their voices being used, this new wave of AI voice technology has been used on social media in both relatively harmless ways, from memes of US presidents playing video games together, to actively dangerous ones, like fake celebrity endorsements and slander. It’s clear that as AI voice technology continues to evolve, we will need to become more vigilant with what we hear online.
If you would like to learn more about the advancement of AI technology and its impact on the voice over industry, feel free to contact our studio team at [email protected].
As a journalist specialising in video content, Emily possesses expertise across all facets of the industry, from emerging trends to innovative communication strategies that empower brands to effectively tell their stories.