Ep. 5: AI, Voice Cloning, and Hearing Lost Loved Ones Anew

How a grieving son uses AI to hear his late father speak.

Edward O’Donnell passed away in 2020 after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease. (Photo courtesy of Andy O’Donnell.)

Visit Andy O’Donnell’s Amazon page at https://www.amazon.com/stores/J.-Andrew-ODonnell/author/B08D91NG1J

Read the poem “Epitaph” by Merrit Malloy at https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/85635.Merrit_Malloy

Andy’s voice-cloning tutorial:

1. Go to https://elevenlabs.io and register for a “starter” account (the minimum level required to create a cloned voice).
2. Go to the “Voice Lab” section of the site.
3. Click the “+” button to “Add Generative or Cloned Voice” and choose the “Instant Voice Cloning” option.
4. Name your voice and fill out the rest of the details.
5. Upload video clips (containing audio) or other file types (MP3 files) containing audio samples of your loved one’s voice. For best results, you should try to make sure the clip contains audio of only their voice; edit out other people’s voices if possible.
6. Submit the samples, and wait a few minutes for the service to build the voice clone.
7. Once the voice is created, tap the “Use” button on the Voice Lab page or tap “Speech Synthesis” from the top-right menu and select the voice you just created.
8. Type or copy/paste what you want the voice to say and tap “Generate,” and wait until the text-to-speech conversion process is done.
9. Press the play button to hear the cloned voice say what you typed, and tap download and if you want to save it.
10. If you want to adjust anything to try and make it sound better, tap the “Voice Settings” drop down menu and adjust the sliders. I raised the “Style Exaggeration” up to middle level and that seemed to really improve the believability of the voice for me.

Music by Chris Zabriskie, Chad Crouch, and Alexis & the Samurai

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