Article updated on January 24, 2021 by Byothe
With the advent of new technologies, the limits of the impossible are always pushed a little further. Until now, to reproduce the voice of a personality, it was necessary to rely on imitators (or not), now, there are computer solutions that allow you to use someone's voice to make them say what you want.
The website Voices by Headliner allows you, in fact, to use the voices of around twenty American personalities to deliver a text of your choice : Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Beyonce… and many others.
To do this, simply select the personality you want to embody (they are identified by their first name, but their face is displayed once selected). And you can then type the text of your choice to have it said by the personality in question. Since the personalities are American, it is obvious that the texts in English will work better, but know that it is still possible to have them speak French with a fairly pronounced accent, but nevertheless charming!
To create this tool, the developers used the service Microsoft Custom Voice which allows you to create voice models. To create a custom voice font, they had to send small pieces of monologue with the corresponding text transcription. Microsoft recommends using 30 minutes to 40 hours of monologue to create a credible voice, but the developers chose to use only 5 to 10 minutes of audio for 2 good reasons:
- it takes a long time to get each voice in the necessary data format….and they preferred to prioritize the number of voices available over the quality of the voices
- He wanted to achieve voices that were realistic and captured the essence of the person, but not too realistic so that they could not be used for malicious purposes.
Nevertheless, the result is really realistic (especially for English text, of course) and above all it allows you to have a little fun. In addition, the site allows you to generate a video in the form of meme which takes the face of the chosen personality, telling what you wanted him to say.
