Voicemod has created 20 “AI people,” digital characters that allow gamers to speak in a voice different from their own.
voice module
A Spanish artificial intelligence company has launched some “artificial intelligence” that will allow people to modify their voices in real time in video games.
Valencia-based Voicemod released 20 humanoid characters on Wednesday, ranging from women in their 20s to older men. These voices are trained on the voices of professional human voice actors.
In a demo of the technology on a call with CNBC, Voicemod CEO Jaime Bosch showed himself speaking often and changing it into several different voices, from a high-pitched female voice to a baritone.
Gamers can download the app on their Apple Mac or Windows PC and incorporate Voicemod’s technology into a “virtual microphone” that sits between the microphone apps they’re using and can start speaking through an alternate character.
Bringing together talents from the leading technical universities of Valencia and Barcelona, Voicemod has been working on speech synthesis and interactive audio features since 2014, with many of its employees specializing in music technology and audio.
More than 40 million people use Voicemod’s technology, which allows people on the social app Discord to talk to each other in a voice different from their own while playing games.
“We have an amazing creative community and mostly use it to have fun, enjoy it with friends and feel like a part of it,” Bosch told CNBC.
“One of my favorite biggest use cases is shy people — we’ve had people who have written to us saying I can’t really relate to people who can do that right now.”
This is a milestone in the field of conversational artificial intelligence. While many of today’s AI algorithms allow people to submit text and receive AI-generated content, ensuring this is done in real time is much more difficult.
The technique requires a lot of computing power. Producing and patenting the proprietary algorithmic models behind it requires significant investment and talent.
To that end, Voicemod has raised $23 million in cash from several venture capitalists including Leadwind and Bitkraft Ventures.
Bosch is no stranger to the risks of how the technology could end up being misused — voice-changing technology, for example, could be used to impersonate major political figures or trick people.
“It’s something I think about every day, and our company thinks about creating sound every day,” he said.
The company is nearing completion of a “watermarking” solution that can identify whether speech was generated using a modified system. It is also discussing the standardization of such systems with other companies and ensuring the safe release of voice-changing technology.
“One thing is that clear laws will come out,” Bosch said. “We know that Europe is working on this. The reality is that, often times, companies move faster than the law.”
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