New AI voice tool trained to copy British regional accents

There is concern that languages and dialects are being lost in the digital era. "Among the over seven thousand languages that still exist today, almost half are endangered according to UNESCO; about a third have some online presence; less than 2 percent are supported by Google Translate; and according to OpenAI's own testing, only fifteen, or 0.2 percent are supported by GPT-4 [an OpenAI model] above an 80 percent accuracy," writes Karen Hao in the book Empire of AI. "Language models are homogenising speech," agrees AI expert Henry Ajder, who advises governments and tech firms, including Synthesia. However, the better these products become, the more effective they will also be in the hands of scammers. Synthesia's product will not be free when it is released in the coming weeks, and will have guardrails around hate speech and explicit material. But there are already many free, open-source voice-cloning tools which are easily accessible and less protected.