A radio DJ has lent his voice to an AI-powered system that could see his vocal delivery live on in many different places.
Andy Chanley has been a professional DJ for more than three decades and currently hosts a show on public radio station 88.5 KCSN in Southern California.
His voice has been used as the basis for a robotic DJ or voice avatar also known as ANDY – short for Artificial Neural Disk-JockeY.
For Chanley, the robot has extra significance as he discovered that he had lymphoma, a form of cancer, while he was recording his voice.
He has since made a recovery but said that ANDY would have made sure that his children would not forget what he sounded like had things gone differently.
He also suggested that it could provide an income after he was gone that might one day send his kids to college.
In a press demonstration of the technology, the artificial ANDY declared: “I may be a robot, but I still love to rock.”
According to Reuters, the voice was difficult to tell apart from a real human disc jockey.
The vocal avatar technology has been developed by WellSaid Labs, an artificial intelligence start-up based in Seattle.
We’re increasingly used to our devices speaking to us, from smartphone apps and virtual assistants to doorbells and even toasters connected to the Internet of Things (IoT).
It’s difficult to get them to sound like real human voices when they are stringing new words and sentences together though.
Robot DJ will be integrated into a music production platform
WellSaid Labs believes that it has managed to do that, with more than 50 voice avatars based on different human voices so far.
Los Angeles-based AI start-up Super Hi-Fi is set to integrate ANDY into its AI-powered music production platform.
This will allow the robot to essentially DJ a playlist, introducing the songs and telling the listener about them.
As well as acting as a DJ, the avatars can be used to deliver corporate training materials or narrate audiobooks, with the voice owners entering commercial agreements with WellSaid Labs.
For now, the start-up’s voice avatars need to be provided with dialogue, which is created and typed by a human.
The next stage, which the company’s CEO said would take things to the next level, involves the AI being able to create its own script.
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