The Download: AI-restored voices, and bot relationships

Jules Rodriguez lost his voice in October of last year. His speech had been deteriorating since a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2020, but a tracheostomy to help him breathe dealt the final blow. Rodriguez and his wife, Maria Fernandez, who live in Miami, thought they would never hear his voice again. After feeding old recordings of Rodriguez's voice into a tool trained on voices from film, television, radio, and podcasts, the couple were able to generate a voice clone--a way for Jules to communicate in his "old voice." Rodriguez is one of over a thousand people with speech difficulties who have cloned their voices using free software from ElevenLabs.