My Journey Inside the Voice-Clone Factory
My voice was ready. I’d been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.” I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me.
I had thought it’d be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I’d sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid $22 for a “creator” account, and uploaded some recordings of myself. A few hours later, I typed some words into a text box, hit “Enter,” and there I was: all the nasal lilts, hesitations, pauses, and mid-Atlantic-by-way-of-Ohio vowels that make my voice mine.
It was me, only more pompous. My voice clone speaks with the cadence of a pundit, no matter the subject. I type I like to eat pickles, and the voice spits it out as if I’m on Meet the Press. That’s not my voice’s fault; it is trained on just a few hours of me speaking into a microphone for various podcast appearances. The model likes to insert ums and ahs: In the recordings I gave it, I’m thinking through answers in real time and choosing my words carefully. It’s uncanny, yes, but also quite convincing—a part of my essence that’s been stripped, decoded, and reassembled by a little algorithmic model so as to no longer need my pesky brain and body.
Using ElevenLabs, you can clone your voice like I did, or type in some words and hear them spoken by “Freya,” “Giovanni,” “Domi,” or hundreds of other fake voices, each with a different accent or intonation. Or you can dub a clip into any one of 29 languages while preserving the speaker’s voice. In each case, the technology is unnervingly good. The voice bots don’t just sound far more human than voice assistants such as Siri; they also sound better than any other widely available AI audio software right now. What’s different about the best ElevenLabs voices, trained on far more audio than what I fed into the machine, isn’t so much the quality of the voice but the way the software uses context clues to modulate delivery. If you feed it a news report, it speaks in a serious, declarative tone. Paste in a few paragraphs of Hamlet, and an ElevenLabs voice reads it with a dramatic storybook flare.
