The Broadcast and Communications Union (BCU) in Argentina are taking action against the use of synthetic voices in that country. These actions have been triggered by a company called Voicely.net who have been aggressively marketing their text-to-speech solution on social media with slogans such as ‘Never pay for a voiceover again!’.
Raoul Wedel (left) whose company Wedel Software developed the Adthos synthetic voice platform says. “Interesting to note that Voicely has no contact information listed on their site and their terms and conditions and their privacy policy are still displaying ‘lorum ipsum’ text. And while they show the logos of #Azure, #AWS, #GoogleCloud and #IBM on their site, it seems that they are maybe just providing a gateway to those APIs rather than supporting their own product.
“This will be the first time that unions are uniting against the subject of #syntheticvoices and, to my knowledge, #syntheticmedia in general. It will be interesting to see what big tech does about an anonymous company using AI technology in this way as this is really putting AI ethics to the test,” wrote Mr Wedel on his LinkedIn page.
With the Adthos platform, Wedel Software has been providing realistic text-to-speech for broadcasters for almost two years. “But we are doing it with the inclusion of voiceover artists – Adthos has more than 50 professional voice talents on the platform and, as far as we know, is the only synthetic voice provider that pays royalties to voice talents for the use of their voices.
“While we understand the actions of the Argentinian Unions, we also think that a better approach is try to figure out how to work alongside this technology – it is here, it will continue to develop, and now is the time to ensure you get ahead of it and realize the potential benefits.” says Mr Wedel.
See the article on the Argentinian unions here:
https://lnkd.in/ef5hS9RX
And my comments in Spanish here:
https://lnkd.in/eyeEV2dZ
#synteticvoices #voiceai, #syntheticmedia, #conversationalai en #artificialintelligence
... radio "schools" are churning out dozens of new announcers, but ask any PD or manager in the bush how they're going at getting youngsters to tear themselves away from capital cities and get their start in radio ... soon it will be nothing but chatbots and AI voices all over the place ...