Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
You may not think of it this way, but you probably hear AI voices all the time. When you’re talking to Alexa or Siri, that’s a model trained on human speech to be able to say almost anything. Did you ever have a celebrity give you directions on Waze? AI. And every time you watch TikTok and you hear that slightly too chipper voice speaking the captions aloud, that’s AI all the way down. Heck, Apple’s AI will even read you a romance novel before you go to bed.
AI systems are getting good at turning text into believable speech in almost any language and almost any voice. And on this episode of The Vergecast, the first in our three-part miniseries on AI, that voice is mine. We trained a bunch of different AI bots with the sound of my voice —…