I do not personally prefer it, but a non-trivial number of individuals like video/audio presentations over writing.
Given that rights about ones likeness (Personality rights) are somewhat defined there might be a legitimate usecase here. For example, a user might prefer a TTS with the voice of a familiar presenter from TV over a generic voice.
But it sounds exceedingly easy to abuse (similar to other generative AI applications) in order to exploit end-users (social engineering) and voice "providers" (exploitation of personality rights).
I have their app on my phone and it will read articles in Burt Reynold's voice, Maya Angelou's voice & etc. I'm under the impression that they consented to this and their estate's are being compensated (hopefully).
Last year I proudly said it was "two thousand and five" during a video take, and didn't notice it at the time. I was able to add the "twenty" using Descript.
1. don't (keep it silent);
2. recruit the original VA somehow;
3. recruit an alternative VA (who hopefully sounds close enough to the original to not be jarring);
4. splice voice lines together from existing voice lines; or
5. use text-to-speech.
Voice cloning is just Option 5 but with results much closer to Options 2 and 3.
If you're in the USA, your credit card company captures your biometric voiceprint without consent or even notification when you call customer service. This technology makes that pointless.
A good reason to let any caller ID one does not recognize go to voice mail. Phones need an app that does voice-to-text-to-voice to prevent capturing the voice. I want mine to sound like Smeagol (LoTR).
pogue•1w ago
tefkah•1w ago
pogue•1w ago
jaggs•1w ago
pogue•1w ago
BadBadJellyBean•1w ago
https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS
https://modelscope.cn/studios/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS
You can even do it on your PC. I did it via ComfyUI and this Plugin:
https://github.com/flybirdxx/ComfyUI-Qwen-TTS
pogue•1w ago
tosti•1w ago
HanClinto•1w ago
[0] - https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS
[1] - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/qwen3-tts/
pogue•1w ago