M+E Daily

Kyiv, Ukraine-based voice cloning company Respeecher demonstrated its artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology on 29 Feb., during the ITS Localisation event in London.

During the session, “Voice Technology Spotlight,” the company unveiled a unique demonstration created specifically for ITS: Localisation.

“We are doing AI voice cloning and speech synthesis, and [for] many of the things we will hear today about AI … we are part of that, Margarita Grubina, a business development specialist at Respeecher, told attendees at the start of the session.

“We’ve been doing this for more than six years, delivering [voice technology] through projects for the best entertainment companies and beyond entertainment,” she noted.

But she said: “Our core technology is speech to speech, which basically means you can take a voice or one person and make it sound like another particular person.”

However, it is “better to show our work than just talk about it,” she said, before playing a short video for attendees that showed what her company’s technology is capable of.

“There are a lot of applications for voice cloning in dubbing and vocalisation,” she pointed out. “One of the great applications is that it lets you use the voice assistant in quite a variety of ways. So you are not dependent on voice actors’ availability and voice actors can take sick leave for vacation days and feel free from anxiety,” she explained.

For the project that was mentioned at the event, the actor passed away and the character played by that actor was “really associated in Germany with his voice, so we brought back his voice to keep the character consistent,” she said.

There are, meanwhile, also “great applications for accent adaptation, and it’s possible now,” she said.

“For example, if you have an actor who is American and they need to play a British character, sometimes their accent might feel a bit unnatural, and now it’s possible to change [that] with the technology. There are also cases for cross cultural adaptation because, with voice cloning technology, it’s “easy to access a voice for some fixes whenever you need it…. You can bring iconic voices” to a project, she said, pointing to Morgan Freeman as a perfect example.

“Everyone knows that he has a great voice. But actually, growing up in Ukraine, I had no idea what Morgan Freeman sounded like because he’s not Russian,” she told attendees. “But with the help of voice cloning, we can make Morgan Freeman speak Ukrainian or Chinese or Bulgarian, or whatever other language” a project needs.

She went on to provide attendees with a demonstration of what the company’s technology can achieve.

ITS Localisation was presented by MESA in association with the Content Localisation Council and Smart Content Council, and sponsored by Dubformer, Iyuno, AppTek, EIDR, Blu Digital Group, OOONA, Papercup, and Deluxe.