(For example, try thinking of all the different ways there are to say: “The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.”)

In theory, a training model could get everything it needed from a single sentence known as a phonetic pangram, which contains every phoneme of English, although in practice this varies depending on your accent. Words are constructed from syllables, which are built from phonemes-all the individual sounds that your mouth is able to make. “The more data you have the more performance you can get, but we can do something in a couple of minutes,” says Shreyas Nivas, Replica cofounder and CEO. Brisbane-based Replica Studios has built a model that can be trained to recreate a voice simply by being fed recordings of 20 short but specific sentences. The amount of training data required has decreased drastically, Flynn says, from 30 to 50 hours down to just 10 or 20 minutes. “We stretch those natural points and nuances and inflections.” “We know the difference between sarcasm and sincerity, and the tiny little clues in sound,” says John Flynn, Sonantic cofounder and CTO. They work with voice actors to get a wide range of training data-several hours of the actors running through different lines, with different emotional tones. So it doesn’t sound as energetic as Homer might.”īritish startup Sonantic has developed a way of bringing that emotional range to AI voices. “If the model hasn’t been exposed to those quite wide ranges of emotion it can’t create it from scratch. “It does depend on the training data,” McSmythurs says. The outputs are recognizably Homer, but they sound a little emotionally flat, as if he’s reading out something that he doesn’t really understand the meaning of. In a recent episode, Edna Krabappel-Bart’s long-suffering teacher, whose character was retired from the show after the death of voice actor Marcia Wallace in 2013-was brought back for a final farewell using recordings that had been made for previous episodes.Īfter that, it’s a matter of asking the model to generate multiple takes-each one will vary slightly -and choosing the best one for your purposes. They certainly don’t need the money-between fees for new episodes and residuals from repeats of old ones, they’re sitting on tens of millions of dollars.īut maybe the producers of the show don’t actually need voice actors anymore.

The actors who play Springfield’s residents are approaching retirement age-they’re mostly in their sixties or seventies Shearer is 77-and they might soon decide they don’t want to do it anymore. The show often jokes about the replaceability of voice actors in animation, but as it pushes through its fourth decade, it’s the iconic voices behind the laughter that could pose the biggest threat to its continued presence. After a few months, Shearer relented and signed a new deal.

Disintegration voice actors