The AI voice will be able to flirt with you

The use of artificial intelligence is becoming more and more common. It has played a role from improving presentations to outright giving the presentation through a robot. While these voices so far have been limited in their production to smooth, professional sounds, that is about to change.

Sonantic, an AI voice startup, says it’s made a minor breakthrough in its development of audio deepfakes, creating a synthetic voice that can express subtleties like teasing and flirtation. It can purportedly do so by incorporating non-verbal elements into the delivery, such as hidden chuckles and sighs.

Voice modulation has seen a number of potential benefits, such as clearer communication and call center work, but now you might have robots that speak in ways that are near-indistinguishable from that of a real person.

“We chose love as a general theme,” Sonantic co-founder and CTO John Flynn told The Verge. “But our research goal was to see if we could model subtle emotions. Bigger emotions are a little easier to capture.”

A sample of the audio can be found on YouTube, and has been described as “Photoshop for voice”. Emotional choices for delivery include anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and joy, and, with this week’s update, flirtatious, coy, teasing, and boasting. A “director mode” allows for even more tweaking: the pitch of a voice can be adjusted, the intensity of delivery dialed up or down, and those little non-speech vocalizations like laughs and breaths inserted.

While this might help in certain aspects of life, such as taking over tedious tasks that require calling in, or maintaining a happy tone throughout a customer service call, it does give one pause. Would the software be used to mimic real people? Would it be used to replace podcast hosts? It’s hard to predict how this software might be used and misused.