The Voice Assistant that Speaks with Your Voice

The Korean company Samsung Electronics announced new updates to its voice assistant Bixby that are designed to improve user experience, performance, and capabilities of the intelligent assistant and platform. One of the most interesting innovations concerns the voice of the users. According to Samsung, they „can personalize their Bixby Text Call voice“. „Using the new Bixby Custom Voice Creator, users can record different sentences for Bixby to analyze and create an AI generated copy of their voice and tone. Currently available in Korean, this generated voice is planned to be compatible with other Samsung apps beyond phone calls“ (Samsung, 22 February 2023). As early as 2017, Oliver Bendel wrote with respect to Adobe VoCo: „Today, just a few minutes of samples are enough to be able to imitate a speaker convincingly in all kinds of statements.“ In his article „The synthetization of human voices“, published in AI & Society, he also made ethical considerations. Now there seems to be a recognized market for such applications and they are being rolled out more widely.

Fig.: A Samsung building in Warsaw