Voice as a service

This week, we cover the chaotic developments around synthetic
voices, their generation, and ownership.


We start with the news about Marvel.ai, the new service from
American AI vendor Veritone that promises to enable celebrities
to monetize their voices. The company calls this
Voice-as-a-Service, or VAAS.


The main problem with synthetic voices is it’s currently
challenging  (well, pretty much impossible) to enforce
copyright for an AI model based on voice recordings of a real
person.


Cue countless examples  of Internet denizens misusing voices
with no apparent retribution –  from the mixes produced by
British experimental musician and campaigner casseteboy,
 who makes Boris Johnson say things like “you can tell our
technology’s  going well, we’re running this whole thing in
Excel,” to more recent  examples of sound clips created
using Uberduck.ai,  and a variety of quickly, cheaply
synthesized celebrity voices. These  include the
version of Sir Patrick Stewart you’ve heard opening the
 show.


In other news, our own Ben Wodecki is now 25! Treasure your
youth, Ben.


We also cover: Hatsune Miku! Impersonators! TikTok! Cameo!
Stephen Hawking! Auto-Tune!


Every like we receive goes towards helping struggling podcast
producers.


As always, you can find the people responsible for the circus
podcast online:


Max Smolaks (@maxsmolax)

Sebastian Moss (@SebMoss)

Tien Fu (@tienchifu)

Ben Wodecki (@benwodecki)