WellSaid Labs describes what clients can expect from its "eight new digital voice actors!" Tobin is "energetic and insightful." Paige is "poised and expressive." Ava is "polished, self-assured, and professional." Each one is based on a real voice actor, whose likeness (with consent) has been preserved using AI.

WellSaid Labs, whose tools create synthetic speech that could be mistaken for the real thing, has raised a $10M Series A to grow the business. The company's home-baked text-to-speech engine works faster than real time and produces natural-sounding clips of pretty much any length, from quick snippets to hours-long readings. WellSaid came out of the Allen Institute for AI incubator in 2019, and its goal was to make synthetic voices that didn't sound so robotic for common business purposes like training and marketing content. It achieved that first by basing its solution on Tacotron, a speech engine developed by Google and academic researchers. But soon it had built its own that was more efficient, resulted in more convincing voices, and could produce clips of arbitrary lengths.

San Francisco (CNN Business)It could be any ad on YouTube: A blonde model playfully puts her hand in front of the camera lens, dons white sunglasses and flashes a grin. In the background, hip-hop music plays while an unmistakably female voice says, "Fashion changes, but style lasts forever." The ad -- part of a demo reel on YouTube created by a new startup called WellSaid Labs -- is short and slick. But something is a bit different. While the model you see is a human, the background voice you hear only sounds like one. The Seattle-based company is using voice actors and artificial intelligence to create synthetic voices that sound a heck of a lot like people.