It essentially teaches itself the specific patterns of a person's speech.Īt the end of the recording session, I send Speech Morphing the audio files. Yassa says the company chooses utterances that will produce a wide enough variety of sounds across a range of emotions – such as apologetic, enthusiastic, angry and so on – to feed a neural network-based AI training system. The hundreds of phrases I record so that Speech Morphing can build my digital voice double seem very random: 'Here the explosion of mirth drowned him out.' 'That's what Carnegie did.' 'I'd like to be buried under Yankee Stadium with JFK.' And so on.īut they aren't as random as they appear. 'We extract 10 to 15 minutes of net recordings for a basic build,' says Speech Morphing founder and CEO Fathy Yassa. For a basic conversational build, all a customer has to do is record themselves saying a bunch of scripted lines for roughly an hour.

Given the complexities of speech synthesis, it's quite a shock to find out just how easy it is to order one up. So I approached San Francisco Bay Area-based natural language speech synthesis company Speech Morphing about creating a clone – or 'digital double' – of my own voice. I wanted to find out what's involved in the process at the customer end. Jackson voice clone delivering the weather report on Alexa today. So it's not surprisingly taken well over 200 years for synthetic voices to get from the first speaking machine, invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen around 1800 – a boxlike contraption that used bellows, pipes and a rubber mouth and nose to simulate a few recognizably human utterances, like mama and papa – to a Samuel L. So it is necessarily interdisciplinary, and quite demanding in terms of what you need to master in order to do anything of consequence.' 'To analyze the voice really requires quite a lot of knowledge about acoustics, vocal mechanisms and physiological aspects. 'The voice is not easy to grasp,' says Klaus Scherer, emeritus professor of the psychology of emotion at the University of Geneva. The science behind making machines talk just like humans is very complex, because our speech patterns are so nuanced.

Reporter Chloe Veltman reacts to hearing her digital voice double, 'Chloney,' for the first time, with Speech Morphing chief linguist Mark Seligman.

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