A common theme from 2023 to early 2024 has been the continued increase in interest in AI use cases.
Among the leaders in the space is OpenAIwhich introduced a new product on Friday.
What happened: OpenAI has made a big investment from the tech giant Microsoft Corp MSFT at the beginning of 2024.
With the investment, Microsoft has solidified its plans to aggressively grow in the artificial intelligence space.
OpenAI is a leader in generative artificial intelligence, and its ChatGPT chatbot can help turn text and suggestions into stories, graphs, tables, insights, and more.
On Friday OpenAI presented its latest product, which is called “Speech engine.”
According to TechCrunch, Voice Engine is a voice cloning tool that expands on its existing text-to-speech API.
The company has been working on Voice Engine for about two years and could allow users to copy a voice after uploading a 15-second voice sample.
OpenAI’s Voice Engine announcement on Friday follows a recent trademark filing shared by Trademark Lawyer Josh Gerben of the Gerben law.
“OpenAI has filed a trademark application for: ‘Voice Engine’,” Gerben tweeted. “The document states that OpenAI will soon allow users to: 1. Build digital voice assistants. 2. Generate audio in response to user requests.”
The full trademark filing lists the following use cases for Voice Engine:
Automatic recognition and generation of speech and voice
Creation of digital voice assistants
Generation of audio/and/or voice in response to user requests
Create and generate voice and audio output based on natural language instructions, text, speech, visual instructions, images and/or video
Related Link: Microsoft May Face Justice Department, FTC Investigates Investments in Parent Company ChatGPT OpenAI
Because it is important: TechCrunch is quick to point out the potential risks of the new voice cloning tool, which comes as deepfake technology has surged and artificial intelligence may continue to provide risks of widespread fakes of celebrities and politicians that confuse the public.
OpenAI ensures that the tool was created responsibly.
“We want to make sure that everyone feels good about how it’s being deployed, that we understand the landscape of where this technology is dangerous, and that we have mitigations for that,” Jeff Harris, an OpenAI product staff member, told TechCrunch.
The current Voice Engine does not allow customization of the tone or pitch of the voice. Prices seen by TechCrunch show a cost of about $1 per hour for voice technology, which would be cheaper than voice actors.
Voice Engine is released initially to a small group of developers and is not currently publicly available.
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