Another tool, Personal Voice, launched at the same event, can replicate a user's voice using a one-minute speech sample. This tool can be used to create personalized voice assistants, dub content into different languages, and generate bespoke narrations. To avoid legal issues, Microsoft requires users to give explicit consent before their voices can be synthesized. However, Microsoft did not respond to questions about compensating actors for their personal voice contributions or plans to watermark AI-generated voices for easy identification.
Key takeaways:
- Microsoft has launched a new tool called Azure AI Speech text to speech avatar, which can create a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate it to say things the person didn’t necessarily say.
- The tool can be used to create training videos, product introductions, customer testimonials, conversational agents, virtual assistants, chatbots and more.
- Microsoft also launched a related generative AI tool, personal voice, that can replicate a user’s voice in a few seconds provided a one-minute speech sample as an audio prompt.
- There are ethical concerns around the use of these tools, particularly around the use of actors' likenesses without proper compensation or notification, and the potential for misuse in creating false information or propaganda.