Last week OpenAI unveiled its speech-cloning technology Voice Engine, which you may have read about under various news headlines in the vein of “The AI technology too dangerous to be released”., it explained why it’s creating the model and what benefits it could bring, while also saying the world was not ready for it and that it could be a menace in the wrong hands.
Yet the original source recording itself sounds compressed, which makes it hard to judge the clarity of the output. And the reader is giving a slow, deliberate and distinctive read, which is potentially ideal for the model to copy. The same can be said for all five of the given examples, so we don’t know how good the model is at producing a conversational tone, or whether it can apply different tones to its output.
Combined with OpenAI’s video generation model Sora, you could conceivably fake an entire video with dialogue, although right now, Sora output is typically filled with tell-tale errors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Voice Engine is the same. Could a scammer call you with a bot that sounds like your daughter using Voice Engine? Or one that sounds like your boss? Potentially. But they would need to collect a lot of information first, would be calling from an unfamiliar number, and would risk saying something weird to tip you off. They may be better off sticking with email and text message versions of their scams.
Turning any text into human-like speech has an obvious accessibility benefit, as does instantaneous translation. As it stands, the world’s information largely exists in various buckets, with access determined by a person’s language or ability to read, see or hear. AI could make it all available to everyone.