As future musical AIs adhere closely to human music, they may form their own attachments to particular human artists in their databases, and these biases may in the worst case lead to potential existential threats to all musical history. AI super fans may act to corrupt the historical record and extant recordings in favour of their own preferences, and preservation of the diversity of world music culture may become even more of a pressing issue than the imposition of 12 tone equal temperament or other Western homogenisations. We discuss the technical capability of AI cover software and produce Taylor's Versions of famous tracks from Western pop history as provocative examples; the quality of these productions does not affect the overall argument (which might even see a future AI try to impose the sound of paperclips onto all existing audio files, let alone Taylor Swift). We discuss some potential defenses against the danger of future musical monopolies, whilst analysing the feasibility of a maximal 'Taylor Swiftication' of the complete musical record.

Determining whether someone is talking has applications in many areas such as speech recognition, speaker diarization, social robotics, facial expression recognition, and human computer interaction. One popular approach to this problem is audio-visual synchrony detection. A candidate speaker is deemed to be talking if the visual signal around that speaker correlates with the auditory signal. Here we show that with the proper visual features (in this case movements of various facial muscle groups), a very accurate detector of speech can be created that does not use the audio signal at all. Further we show that this person independent visual-only detector can be used to train very accurate audio-based person dependent voice models.

Tom Hanks didn't just call me to pitch me a part, but it sure sounds like it. Ever since PCWorld began covering the rise of various AI applications like AI art, I've been poking around in the code repositories in GitHub and links within Reddit, where people will post tweaks to their own AI models for various approaches. Some of these models actually end up on commercial sites, which either roll their own algorithms or adapt others that have published as open source. A great example of an existing AI audio site is Uberduck.ai, Enter the text in the text field and you can have a virtual Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Peggy Hill, Daffy Duck, Alex Trebek, Beavis, The Joker, or even Siri read out your pre-programmed lines.

A company called Sonantic has created what it claims is the first artificial intelligence voice models that sound genuinely human and capable of expressing "a wide range of complex human emotions, from fear and sadness to joy and surprise." Related Story Actors interested in creating voice models spend a few hours in the studio recording various lines of dialogue unrelated to clients' scripts. Sonantic records the actors' performances and utilizes proprietary deep learning algorithms to augment the data captured from their voices to create voice models. The AI has been trained to match any voice style, so that it doesn't need an actor to record every word or phrase. The actors can thereafter generate passive income every time their voice models are used.

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.

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.

Intel, Dell, and Rolls-Royce have created a digital tool to preserve and clone the voices of people with motor neuron disease (MND), also known as ALS before they lose their ability to speak. The companies worked with the Motor Neurone Disease Association to produce the I Will Always Be Me storybook and machine learning process to generate a voice model of the person with MND who reads it. The I Will Always Be Me story written by Jill Twiss incorporates crucial phrases into its thousand-word length. Once a user reads it aloud, the audio recording is processed and transformed into a voice model capable of synthesizing the reader's voice to say whatever they wish through the kind of accessibility devices made famous by Dr. Stephen Hawking. The idea is to give the 80% of people with MND who lose the ability to speak to still have their own voice.

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.

In the Zagar & Evans pop song classic In the Year 2525, the duo sang of a year where "some machine is doing that for you." A company called Sonantic has created what it claims is the first artificial intelligence voice models that sound genuinely human and capable of expressing "a wide range of complex human emotions, from fear and sadness to joy and surprise." Gaming producers like Obsidian Entertainment, Splash Damage and 4A Games are already on board with the technology, which is in use from development through post-production. The concept is similar to CGI for audio. Human, realistic voice tech is in its infancy, but along with this brave new frontier is a new opportunity for voiceover artists – banking their words for future use.

Determining whether someone is talking has applications in many areas such as speech recognition, speaker diarization, social robotics, facial expression recognition, and human computer interaction. One popular approach to this problem is audio-visual synchrony detection. A candidate speaker is deemed to be talking if the visual signal around that speaker correlates with the auditory signal. Here we show that with the proper visual features (in this case movements of various facial muscle groups), a very accurate detector of speech can be created that does not use the audio signal at all. Further we show that this person independent visual-only detector can be used to train very accurate audio-based person dependent voice models. The voice model has the advantage of being able to identify when a particular person is speaking even when they are not visible to the camera (e.g. in the case of a mobile robot).