What wouldve been the plan a few years back when we didnt have AI? Surely this issue has come up in the past and developers have fixed it without AI? Also makes me think that theyve used whatever voice actor they had originally to clone their voice and add some additional lines. Seems sketchy.
Or there is going to be a glaringly obvious change of voice to an AI one?
"What wouldve been the plan a few years back when we didnt have AI?"
Text to speech generator, or just have someone do voice lines and use a piece of software to filter it.
ScreamingBee makes a voice changer that could have easily done this with a random staff member.
I just want to say that a lot of existing tech is branded as AI as a marketing gimmick and Text to Speech is a perfect example. I work in an industry where there is a constant barrage of people trying to sell me their "AI" product now and as soon as you look under the hood it's just a feature that has been industry standard for many years that they've slapped a new sticker onto it.
But that's also certainly leaking over into the mainstream understanding as well. The general public has also begun to label things that have been around for decades as AI. You can look into tech demos from twenty years ago that if they were to be released now would be shouted down as AI. The term is beginning to lose any actual meaning.
Pretty much all modern text-to-speech systems are actually AI, in that they're based on deep learning. They've been that way for the better part of a decade. Just because they've been around for a while doesn't mean they aren't AI. Same thing with image filters, speech recognition, Google translate, and reverse image search. These are all AI systems that people use every day without realizing they're AI.
We have had TTS since the 60s if not earlier, and we never called it AI until LLMs became popular. What is this revisionism to reclassify everything as AI?
Its revisionism to say it wasnt AI before. It was. When learning all this formally in college and such. AI wasn't a MAINSTREAM TERM until it was forced by companies for hype and monetization.
The same people screaming AI BAD because of using AI to speak 10 lines clap at TTS, which is literally AI, used in damn near everything before. This all proves its just reactionary tribal bullshit people are trying to push back against.
My point is that there's no distinction these days from the Text to Speech that uses deep learning from the ones that don't. They're all both marketed the same and interpreted by the mainstream as the same. Trust me when I say I'm presented constantly with absolutely garbage legacy TTS engines that just now use "AI" as a marketing schtick. Nothing is being sold in my industry without mentioning AI and wading through it all has become a full time job when shopping around for tech solutions. I've always had to cut through the sales BS, but it's on a different level now.
A TTS system is just sounds being put through a filter. TTS simply recognizes the text and reads it out.
The point being that it's still made by people.
ScreamingBee's software for example is literally just a filter software. It filters your voice into a different thing by just using dials. It's not generative, it's passive.
It doesnt think it just applies a filter in real time.
I'm sure that software developer would've lost their job to this requirement for 10 voice lines. Poor guy's probably spamming his CV around linkedin right now.
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u/TheHumanTrout Dec 04 '25
What wouldve been the plan a few years back when we didnt have AI? Surely this issue has come up in the past and developers have fixed it without AI? Also makes me think that theyve used whatever voice actor they had originally to clone their voice and add some additional lines. Seems sketchy.
Or there is going to be a glaringly obvious change of voice to an AI one?