This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here. In January, Microsoft unveiled an AI that can clone a speaker's voice after hearing them talk for just three seconds. While this system, VALL-E, was far from the first voice cloning AI, its accuracy and need for such a small audio sample set a new bar for the tech. Microsoft has now raised that bar again with an update called "VALL-E X," which can clone a voice from a short sample (4 to 10 seconds) and then use it to synthesize speech in a different language, all while preserving the original speaker's voice, emotion, and tone.

Top Gun: Maverick has proven to be a massive success for Tom Cruise, Paramount Pictures, and everyone involved. If you've watched the movie by now, you'll probably agree with most of us that it's an excellent follow-up to the original film from 1986. What you might not know is that Val Kilmer's voice in the movie was brought to life with voice AI. When the original Top Gun was released in 1986, Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise's chemistry on-screen as Iceman and Maverick was an instant hit. Revisiting that story without Kilmer's Iceman would have been disappointing for many fans and even for Kilmer himself.

In Brief No, AI chatbots are not sentient. Just as soon as the story on a Google engineer, who blew the whistle on what he claimed was a sentient language model, went viral, multiple publications stepped in to say he's wrong. The debate on whether the company's LaMDA chatbot is conscious or has a soul or not isn't a very good one, just because it's too easy to shut down the side that believes it does. Like most large language models, LaMDA has billions of parameters and was trained on text scraped from the internet. The model learns the relationships between words, and which ones are more likely to appear next to each other.

Spotify's string of recent acquisitions now includes a potentially huge text-to-speech upgrade. The streaming music service is acquiring Sonantic, a startup that uses AI to produce "stunningly realistic" voices from text. While Spotify didn't divulge its exact plans for the purchase, it teased multiple potential improvements. Sonantic's tech could provide context for upcoming recommendations even when you aren't looking at your screen, Spotify said. The AI voice platform could also "reduce barriers" for new audio experiences.

Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer are not the only stars of the hit movie Top Gun: Maverick. Artificial intelligence is right up alongside Maverick and Iceman to make the drama real and compelling for movie goers around the world. Top Gun: Maverick is the sequel to the 1986 iconic movie Top Gun, in which Cruise and Kilmer played rival students at the U.S. Navy's Fighter Weapons School. Between 1986 and 2022, when Top Gun: Maverick was released both Cruise and Kilmer enjoyed high successful film careers. But unfortunately, Kilmer lost the use of his voice after a battle with throat cancer.

After first starring as Lieutenant Tom "Iceman" Kazansky in the 1986 film "Top Gun," Val Kilmer made his triumphant return, 36 years later, in the sequel "Top Gun: Maverick." In the 2022 film, he now plays an admiral. Kilmer, 62, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 according to The New York Times Magazine. After going through several treatments, including a tracheotomy, he lost his voice, the outlet reports. Kilmer publicly confirmed his diagnosis in 2017 after denying reports of his illness.

The quality of AI-generated voices has improved rapidly in recent years, but there are still aspects of human speech that escape synthetic imitation. Sure, AI actors can deliver smooth corporate voiceovers for presentations and adverts, but more complex performances -- a convincing rendition of Hamlet, for example -- remain out of reach. Sonantic, an AI voice startup, says it's made a minor breakthrough in its development of audio deepfakes, creating a synthetic voice that can express subtleties like teasing and flirtation. The company says the key to its advance is the incorporation of non-speech sounds into its audio; training its AI models to recreate those small intakes of breath -- tiny scoffs and half-hidden chuckles -- that give real speech its stamp of biological authenticity. "We chose love as a general theme," Sonantic co-founder and CTO John Flynn tells The Verge.

A new artificial intelligence program has been developed that can mimic flirty speech patterns, thanks to new'non-word sounds' including sighs and breaths. Sonantic, based in London, England, produces expressive artificial intelligence voices for a range of uses, including Hollywood movies and computer games. The latest development was built with an'unnamed Hollywood client' called'What's Her Secret?', designed to create a flirty female lead character'that has never lived'. They released a video, with the face of an actress but voice of AI, designed to demonstrate it is possible to create'hyper-realistic romantic encounters.' In developing the flirty AI, the team also discovered some secrets that humans can use to sound more romantic and flirty, including slowing down to create suspense, gently smiling when speaking, and keeping a sooth, consistent pace.

Surgery in 2014 forever altered Kilmer's natural voice. The Iceman will not be silenced. Beloved actor Val Kilmer of Top Gun, Tombstone and Willow fame, among many others, lost his voice -- and his career -- to throat cancer after a tracheotomy in 2014. In 2020, Kilmer turned to British AI company Sonantic to create a model of his voice, basically a custom-built audio-only deepfake for the actor's personal use. Sonantic creates voice models primarily for video games using actors who read hours worth of scripts.

A British artificial intelligence (AI) company has recreated Hollywood actor Val Kilmer's voice – with amazingly realistic results. London-based firm Sonantic used the actor's voice recordings from throughout his career, which were fed to their AI to create the lifelike yet artificial mock-up. Film producers could potentially use the tool – described as'Photoshop for voice' – for voiceovers if they have a role in mind that would be suited to Kilmer's tones. Kilmer, whose career has spanned nearly four decades, has starred in blockbusters such as Top Gun, Willow, The Doors, Tombstone and Batman Forever. But after undergoing a tracheotomy in 2014 as part of his treatment for throat cancer, Kilmer's voice is now barely recognisable.