ALS stole this musician's voice. AI let him sing again. Patrick Darling used a music tool from ElevenLabs to perform a song with his former bandmates. There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling's song begins to play. It's a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It's Darling's first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years ago.

AI now sounds more like us - should we be concerned? Several wealthy Italian businessmen received a surprising phone call earlier this year. The speaker, who sounded just like Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, had a special request: Please send money to help us free kidnapped Italian journalists in the Middle East. But it was not Crosetto at the end of the line. He only learned about the calls when several of the targeted businessmen contacted him about them.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) speech generation and voice cloning technologies have produced naturalistic speech and accurate voice replication, yet their influence on sociotechnical systems across diverse accents and linguistic traits is not fully understood. This study evaluates two synthetic AI voice services (Speechify and ElevenLabs) through a mixed methods approach using surveys and interviews to assess technical performance and uncover how users' lived experiences influence their perceptions of accent variations in these speech technologies. Our findings reveal technical performance disparities across five regional, English-language accents and demonstrate how current speech generation technologies may inadvertently reinforce linguistic privilege and accent-based discrimination, potentially creating new forms of digital exclusion. Overall, our study highlights the need for inclusive design and regulation by providing actionable insights for developers, policymakers, and organizations to ensure equitable and socially responsible AI speech technologies.

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.

My brother held his phone up to my ear. "You're gonna find this creepy," he warned. An Instagram reel showing a teenage boy at a rally featured a voiceover in the style of a news broadcast. A calm, female voice, with an almost imperceptible Mancunian accent, said: "The recent outcry from a British student has become a powerful symbol of a deepening crisis in the UK's educational system." I sat bolt upright, my eyes wide open.

Every few years, Hany Farid and his wife have the grim but necessary conversation about their end-of-life plans. They hope to have many more decades together--Farid is 58, and his wife is 38--but they want to make sure they have their affairs in order when the time comes. In addition to discussing burial requests and financial decisions, Farid has recently broached an eerier topic: If he dies first, would his wife want to digitally resurrect him as an AI clone? Farid, an AI expert at UC Berkeley, knows better than most that physical death and digital death are two different things. "My wife has my voice, my likeness, and a lot of my writings," he told me. "She could very easily train a large language model to be an interactive version of me."

WEHEAD connects to ChatGPT and displays a face, expressions and voice. The voice Alexis "Lexi" Bogan had before last summer was exuberant. She loved to belt out Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan ballads in the car. She laughed all the time -- even while corralling misbehaving preschoolers or debating politics with friends over a backyard fire pit. In high school, she was a soprano in the chorus.

The head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an artificial intelligence voice clone. The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives. Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian. During the meeting, the imposters deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window.

I'd been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, "Use voice." I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me. I had thought it'd be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I'd sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid 22 for a "creator" account, and uploaded some recordings of myself. A few hours later, I typed some words into a text box, hit "Enter," and there I was: all the nasal lilts, hesitations, pauses, and mid-Atlantic-by-way-of-Ohio vowels that make my voice mine.

A new tool from OpenAI that can generate a convincing clone of anyone's voice using just 15 seconds of recorded audio has been deemed too risky for general release, as the AI lab seeks to minimise the threat of damaging misinformation in a global year of elections. Voice Engine was first developed in 2022 and an initial version was used for the text-to-speech feature built into ChatGPT, the organisation's leading AI tool. But its power has never been revealed publicly, in part because of the "cautious and informed" approach that OpenAI is taking to release it more widely. "We hope to start a dialogue on the responsible deployment of synthetic voices, and how society can adapt to these new capabilities," OpenAI said in an unsigned blogpost. "Based on these conversations and the results of these small-scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale."