How AI could take the words right out of voice artists’ mouths

These professionals’ voices are their livelihoods – but advances in generative artificial intelligence threaten to take that away as another industry comes under pressure from the technology. Pranshu Verma reports

Bev Standing at her home studio in Frankford, Ontario (Jennifer Roberts/Washington Post)

Companies clamour to use Remie Michelle Clarke’s voice. An award-winning vocal artist, her smooth Irish accent backs ads for Mazda and Mastercard and is the sound of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, in Ireland.

But in January, her sound engineer told Michelle Clarke he’d found a voice that sounded uncannily like hers someplace unexpected: on revoicer.com, credited to a woman named “Olivia”. For a modest monthly fee, Revoicer customers can access hundreds of different voices and, through an artificial intelligence-backed tool, morph them to say anything – to voice commercials, recite corporate trainings or narrate books.

Revoicer advertised Olivia with a photo of a grey-haired woman, who appeared to be of Asian descent, and a blurb: “A deep, calm and kind voice. Excelent [sic] for audio books.”