Originally Broadcast: June 06, 2023
Voice Synthesis is about to transform game development, virtual worlds and simulations of all kinds. I spoke with Zach Johnson, cofounder of LMNT, an AI voice synthesis company that uses the magic of prosody imitation to make voices that sound strikingly like the original speaker. We covered how these technologies work; demonstrated cases with David Attenborough and a flight simulator; discussed the new type of creator economy this will form; user generated content in games; technologies to enable scalability and reliability (such as memory safe languages, e.g., Rust) as well as other things Zach learned from his time working on Google Glass.
00:00 Introduction
03:38 LMNT Voice Synthesis Demo
06:55 Prosody
10:15 Creativity with Generative AI
12:22 Intentionality in Voice Synthesis
19:05 How AI Voice Tech works
23:18 Zach's Background at Google
32:08 Scalability of Systems
36:21 Learning New Things
46:28 AI Transforming the World
51:52 New AI Creator Economy
55:28 AI Voice in Flight Simulator
59:40 Business Models
1:02:26 User Generated Content
Zach Johnson: What makes an artist is somebody who is able to look at the graph of possibility that's out there and navigate it. There's no formula that's going to tell you, oh, this is the way that I should put on Hamlet. There's going to be convention out there of how it is, but everybody who's directing and performing inside a production of Hamlet is bringing their own tastes to the equation. And the artist is somebody who can say, I'm going to create a compelling narrative, a compelling production, which is consistent in and of itself. And I think that's like, that is not going away with Jenna to the AI.