Show notes
Episode Notes
The first voice actor Dan Price called about AI voice cloning interrupted him two sentences in: "I'm in." By Dan's account, 28 of the first 33 actors he called signed on without even discussing the rate. These are the people with the most to lose from AI voices, so why say yes?
Dan has made radio ads for 34 years at Oink Ink Radio, the agency he runs with his brother Jim, for clients he lists from AT\&T and IBM to Google and Ford. He founded BionicVO, a voice platform built on licensed AI clones of working voice actors, where the actor gets paid every time their voice is used. His case: AI voices are already good enough for some producers, so the question for actors isn't whether cloning happens. It's whose terms it happens on.
Their biggest concern, he says, wasn't money. It was protection. He explains the category opt-outs that keep an actor out of jobs they don't want, watermarked auditions he admits a skilled user can strip, a contract and payment for every job, and an inaudible watermark still in development to track where a voice ends up. He also tells why about 3 minutes of audio takes his engineers 7 hours to clone, and about an actor whose mom heard the clone and thought it was them.
Cody and Dan also talk about home studios and the end of the ensemble booth, why Dan still prefers a live actor in a room, why AI still can't write a good radio ad, what voice actors have to accept when their demo reel is already online, and whether AI voice ads should have to say they're AI.
Chapters:
0:00 Why voice actors are letting AI clone them
1:03 AI voices are already good enough for some producers
3:04 From a 1983 cassette to 34 years of radio ads
6:21 The voice actor who said "I'm in"
8:21 How BionicVO works: a recording session in your browser
10:05 Recruiting 100+ voice actors and the 7-hour cloning process
12:43 Home studios, remote sessions and the end of the ensemble booth
17:47 Human engineers, and hiring the human behind the clone
23:38 Protecting actors: opt-outs, watermarks and job contracts
27:58 Why AI still can't write a good radio ad
31:02 127 people, a 10-month build and the cloning bottleneck
35:35 What voice actors have to accept about AI
38:09 Government protection and "made with AI" labels
42:02 A premium on human-made content, and Dan's advice
Find Dan:
BionicVO: https://bionicvo.ai
Mentioned in this episode:
Bev Standing, the voice actor from Welland, Ontario that Dan mentions, sued TikTok in May 2021, saying its text-to-speech feature used her voice without permission. TikTok agreed to settle that September: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701167/bev-standing-tiktok-lawsuit-settles-text-to-speech-voice
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Context: this conversation reflects the speakers' views, including on AI labels and government protection. BionicVO's actor counts and timelines are Dan's own figures. Nothing in this episode is legal advice. Contains explicit language.
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