It's a crushing diagnosis for everyone involved. Jules's wife, Maria, told me that once it was official, she and Jules left the doctor's office gripping each other in floods of tears. Their lives were turned upside down. Four and a half years later, Jules cannot move his limbs, and a tracheostomy has left him unable to speak. "To say this diagnosis has been devastating is an understatement," says Joyce, who has bulbar MND--she can still move her limbs but struggles to speak and swallow.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on course to become the next industrial revolution, impacting nearly every industry in one way or another. And that includes podcasting, where AI voice cloning technology is changing the landscape by offering content creators the ability to generate lifelike voices with ease. The cutting-edge innovation is expected to transform audio production, with AI-powered tools becoming increasingly popular among podcast hosts and producers. However, it is necessary to take a broad look at the production process using AI voice cloning, ethical concerns, and what the future of podcasting might hold as AI-generated voices become more difficult to distinguish. Just want to listen to a podcast?

Artificial intelligence continues to seep into every aspect of our lives: search results, chatbots, images on social media, viral videos, documentaries about dead celebrities. A new class of emerging AI-powered services can take audio clips from voice recordings and build models off them. Anything you type into a computer can be spit out as an impression of that person's voice. Proponents of AI voice cloning see these tools as a way to make life a little easier for content creators. The robovoices can be used to fix mistakes, read ads, or perform other mundane duties.

For years, creating good voice overs meant investing hundreds if not thousands of dollars in hiring voice artists, renting a recording studio to get the script recorded, investing in expensive recording equipment (if you are recording from home), and recruiting or outsourcing the entire project to an audio editor to mix the audio and produce a high-quality voiceover. Not to mention, the valuable hours dedicated to the entire process. Even after all this, the quality of the produced audio file may be subpar. What if there was an alternative to creating studio-quality voiceovers, and that too from the comfort of your own homes? Introducing Murf AI voice generator, which eliminates the entire process of generating voiceovers manually and enables you to quickly produce human-like voiceovers without any specialized hardware or professional. Leveraging advanced AI algorithms and deep learning, the realistic online voice generator tool allows you to convert text into natural-sounding speech, in a matter of just a few minutes.

Cloning your voice using artificial intelligence is simultaneously tedious and simple: hallmarks of a technology that's just about mature and ready to go public. All you need to do is talk into a microphone for 30 minutes or so, reading a script as carefully as you can (in my case: the voiceover from a David Attenborough documentary). After starting and stopping dozens of times to re-record your flubs and mumbles, you'll send off the resulting audio files to be processed and, in a few hours' time, be told that a copy of your voice is ready and waiting. Then, you can type anything you want into a chatbox, and your AI clone will say it back to you, with the resulting audio realistic to fool even friends and family -- at least for a few moments. The fact that such a service even exists may be news to many, and I don't believe we've begun to fully consider the impact easy access to this technology will have.

We're headed for a revolution in computer-generated speech, and a voice clone of Microsoft founder Bill Gates demonstrates exactly why. In the clips embedded below, you can listen to what seems to be Gates reeling off a series of innocuous phrases. "A cramp is no small danger on a swim," he cautions. "Write a fond note to the friend you cherish," he advises. But each voice clip has been generated by a machine learning system named MelNet, designed and created by engineers at Facebook.

Using Artificial Intelligence, two Facebook engineers have now successfully cloned the voices of famous personalities including Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and American actor George Takei among few others. Mike Lewis and Sean Vasquez, the two Facebook engineers developed a computer generated speech system called MelNet using Artificial Intelligence. Not just the voices of famous personalities, they have also created voice and music samples using AI. In a recently published research paper, they mentioned relying on machine learning for the convincing AI generated voice clips. Apart from Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and George Takei, others whose voice have been cloned are – primatologist Jane Goodall, professors Daphne Koller, Fei Fei Li, scientist Stephen Wolfram and Khan Academy founder Sal Khan.