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The software company Cerence made history on November 16th 2020 by conducting one of their quarterly calls using cloned voices of the company CEO and CFO to present financial performance data to financial analysts.
Synthetic voices of Cerence CEO Sanjay Dhawan and CFO Mark Gallenberger were cloned using the Cerence Reader technology, driven by their neural AI-based system called GEEnE.
GEEnE technology–shorthand for generative-end-to-end speech synthesis. GEEnE has the ability to learn to speak with different tones in different contexts, for example, as a newscaster reading the news. GEEnE creates computer AI-generated voice clones using text-to-speech conversion.
Sanjay Dhawan commented about the experience saying:
“The engineer in me was very excited about using Mark and my clone. And, I think this was the world’s first where an earnings call was done by a clone while Mark and I were sipping a cup of coffee and waiting our turn for the Q&A. It was an interesting experience.”
Will this be the future of how businesses are run? Why host live events and business calls, when instead you can have a clone of your own voice read your prepared notes instead, so you don’t even have to be present.
This time efficeint process could become standard practice for public companies. It clearly worked for Cerence.
The argument against this practice is that the CEO and CFO didn’t actually say the statements. A synthetic voice that sounded like them did. The statements were still official communications from the company and therefore are technically sanctioned by the corporate officers. However, there is a difference when you have the actual person making statements that you can refer back to and not simply the text written by a staffer that was rendered audibly by a synthetic voice.
It is not their authentic voice. Authenticity is essential for a modern business.
If a statement is made by a CEO in their own voice was written by a staffer. It’s like two-factor authentication. The corporate officer approved of the statement that was written and then confirmed that approval by making the statement publicly.
AI-based systems now write news articles about earnings releases so it seems only fitting that AI-based systems can also be used to make the audible statements that accompany those announcements.
Cerence gave everyone something to think about this week in terms of how we want or should use our voice technology in everyday activities.
With voice cloning, voice recognition data protection will no longer be secure and anyone could pretend to be you, using your voice. Voice cloning has opened up a whole new dilemma, without doubt there are huge benefits to this technology but also many potential pitfalls such as a new realm of fraud, voice fraud.
What are your thoughts?
Let’s get talking about this, listen to the voice of Limor CEO Shane Monahan on the Limor app discuss this topic then converse with him directly via the Limor voice comments. Its social audio.
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