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If you've ever had the urge to converse with an AI version of yourself, now you can -- kind of.
On Thursday, AI start-up Hume announced the launch of a new "hyperrealistic voice cloning" feature for the latest iteration of its Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) model, EVI 3, which was unveiled last month. The idea is that by uploading a short audio recording of yourself speaking -- ideally between 30 and 90 seconds -- the model should be able to quickly churn out an AI-generated replica of your voice, which you can then interact with verbally, just as you would with another person standing in front of you.
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I uploaded a recording of my voice to EVI 3 and spent some time idly chatting with the model's imitation of my voice. I was hoping (perhaps naively) to have an Uncanny Valley experience -- that exceedingly rare feeling of interacting with something that feels almost completely real, yet off-kilter enough to make one feel slightly uneasy -- and was disappointed when the EVI 3 me was more like an audio cartoon version of myself.
Let me unpack that a bit.
Using EVI 3's voice cloning feature
Screenshot by Webb Wright/ZDNET
The imitation of my voice was, in some ways, undeniably realistic. It seemed to pause intermittently when speaking in more or less the same way that I tend to do, with a touch of familiar vocal fry. But the mirroring stopped there.
Hume claims in its blog post that EVI 3's new voice cloning feature can capture "aspects of the speaker's personality." This is a vague promise (probably intentionally so), but in my own trials, the model seemed to fall short in this regard. Far from feeling like a convincing simulation of my own behavior quirks and sense of humor, the model spoke with a chipper, eager-to-please tone that would've been well-suited to a radio ad for antidepressants. I like to think of myself as being friendly and generally upbeat, but the AI was obviously exaggerating those particular character traits.
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