Day 5: Sunday, 14th Nov 2021
Morning | Follow up calls for the Home Taste BKT business trip |
Afternoon | Lunch with high school friend |
Late Aft. | Made more calls for Home Taste BKT |
Evening | Volleyball |
Night |
|
Another day with hardly any voice acting done, but that's how it is sometimes with a freelance life. Had lunch with a friend and found a nearby cafe to work on my upcoming business trip.
Expanding on the highlights:
Seraphine is a duo band: me the singer, Peter the mixer, masterer. We both write songs. Here's our first album. We occasionally do covers on YouTube.
Then I had a very interesting call with a fellow voice actor who works in an A.I voice cloning company. Normally, I would shut down these companies outright, but she is someone I've voice together with in an audio drama so there is some level of 'trust' there, or openness at least, to hear her take on this. Ultimately, I did not proceed for 2 reasons:
I’ll be putting future-me out of job AND out of income as the royalties are REALLY low. Not to mention there is no upfront recording payment or buyout fee for my voice.
I love being a voice actor. Whether it's narrations, IVR, eLearning or character work. I love the excitement of getting cast, reading the scripts, having table reads, voicing my lines, learning from eLearning materials. I wouldn't be able to do those if clients can just go to the A.I. website and get my voice there.
I discussed with my voice acting coach about this. We did the maths together to gauge how much the pay would be, if it's worth selling our voice. I'm in a position where if I join the 'market' early and have my unique blend of accents, plus my native accent registered in their voice bank, I could obtain a larger 'share' of the market, so to speak. But it just isn't worth it.
I was reassured that the A.I wouldn't be able to replace a human's real voice and all the nuances. But did you know that the A.I voice world is already 'injecting breaths' into those voices to make it sound more natural?
"A bulb that produces light? Impossible!", Thomas Edison did.
"The moon? Impossible!", Neil Armstrong went.
"Talking with someone through a line? Seeing someone's face who lives across the globe? Impossible!"
It always seem impossible until it is done, as said by Nelson Mandela.
It's only a matter of time for the A.I to sound humanlike, and with us participating in providing data to their voice bank only speeds up the process. I will probably write a blog on this extensively in the future.