| ▲ | anigbrowl 3 hours ago | |
I've been a pro sound engineer for 30 years, doing music, film, and producing podcasts for other people, plus I have years of prior training in elocution, which requires knowing about the anatomy and articulation dynamics of the human voice. The voices don't sound that similar to me, and he has what I think of as a generic mid-atlantic accent. I'm sure it feels uncomfortably similar to him, but I think this is a mix of confirmation bias and the fact that radio and tv stations have long selected for 'average' sounding voices because listeners and viewers will call in to complain about voices they find annoying. Performers in this field cultivate those kind of generic voices, much as real estate agents cultivate aim for a friendly-but-bland look rather than trying to stand out individually. I do feel for the guy a bit because voice generation is now so good that there's no reason to pay performers with a 'radio voice' for commercial voice-over or narration work in many cases, and I question the value of applying AI to fields of personal rather than industrial endeavor - was the cost of human vocalization such a drain on the economy that we are better off for automating those jobs away as quickly as possible? However, I don't buy his claim that his individual voice and way of speaking was stolen. It's just not very distinctive to me, in the same way that faces from thispersondoesnotexist.com will inevitably approximate the appearance of some real people. | ||