My wife was training to be a professional voice actor to do dubbing in several languages when we met.
I told her then that the industry would be disrupted by AI before she retired.
Glad she pivoted. Really impressive results.
I told her then that the industry would be disrupted by AI before she retired.
Glad she pivoted. Really impressive results.
Yes. I just discovered there is a text-to-speech addon [1] (now a few months old) for World of Warcraft that adds voices for every NPC in the game... It is so impressive and game changer (pun intended) that I naively asked in the chat of the Twitch stream I was watching "when did Blizzard add voices to the NPCs??". For an instant I really thought Blizzard contracted actors, but no, someone like you and me just used AI to generate realistic voices for every character in the game. I don't think it's ready yet to completely replace actors in video games (surely it will in the near future tho) but voice acting is something so expensive to do that I can see studios and developers in 2024 already use this tech for all the optional dialogues and secondary characters' voices.
a few more years of improvements if they happen could be disruptive
Typesetting. Music engraving. Bookbinding. The quality of all these fields have been materially harmed by advancements.
Computer typesetting has, by and large, been a significant regression, though the gap has largely been made up now if you make the right choices.
Published music scores used to be set by experts. Now they’re set by novices using software that is mechanical in method and generally quite insipid. Most are atrocious compared to the old masters, and mediocre at best compared to the typical published scores from a hundred years ago; and very few popular scores are really good (… and if they are, there’s a reasonably high chance they’ve used GNU LilyPond, which has focused on this problem). But the barrier for entry is so much lower, and people have got used to the inferior results, so I don’t know if anyone engraves music the old way, and even people that know better largely just shrug and make do with the new. Like with computer typesetting, there is hope because things have slowly improved. But most will continue to be mediocre.
Books used to be bound with cold glue. It takes time to set, but the results are very good, supple and long-lasting. Then along came hot-melt glue, and it’s just so much friendlier for cheap manufacturing because books are finished within a few minutes instead of a day or two, that I don’t think anyone produces books the old way any more, even though the results are abysmal in comparison (compare the binding and reading experience of a paperback from the ’40s or ’50s with one from the turn of the century; no one after tasting the old will desire the new; for he says, the old is good). But they’re just (barely) good enough. Unlike the other two, I don’t think there’s any hope here—the regressive advancement crowded out the superior but dearer option so that no place was found for it.
What seems to universally happen is, the market bifurcates - one part is in a race to the bottom, the other (much smaller) aims for super premium tier (overpriced quality), because only those two positions are sustainable, once the race-to-the-bottom side drags all the economies of scale with it. So as a consumer, you get to chose between cheap low-quality garbage that's barely fit for purpose, and rare, super-expensive, professional/elite high-end products. There is no option for "good value for reasonable price".
This has been happening to everything - software, furniture, construction, electronics, vehicles, food, you name it.
Sure the final result sounds slighty robotic. 99% of people wouldn't care, and you can get more training videos done, faster for a fraction of the cost.
[Edit] And I'll add the difference from 6 months ago is noticeable to today. I imagine every 6 months we can just re-download updated voiceovers and every 6 months will sound just slightly more polished..