'Photoshop for voice': Meet the Brisbane startup creating an global marketplace for our voices - SmartCompany

A Brisbane startup pitching itself as "Photoshop for voice" has taken the wraps off its first product, a creative studio powered by an AI able to perfectly replicate someone's voice. Fittingly named Replica, the startup is headed up by founding trio Shreyas Nivas, Riccardo Grinover and Keni Mardira, and has been running in a stealth mode of sorts for the past two years, while the three were building the product. With each founder having varying areas of expertise, Nivas -- who holds a degree in aerospace engineering -- tells StartupSmart the team was brought together through a love for games, and inspired by research into voice synthesis coming out of Google. "Around late 2016, Google released a paper on WaveNet, which was a neural network for voice synthesis which could create human-like speech. It was a natural transition from text-to-speech, and it was almost indistinguishable from actual conversation," he says.