Samsung says customers will be capable of clone their voice to answer calls

AI voice clones are already being deployed in podcasts and video video games, however how lengthy till they are often harnessed instantly by most people? Most likely prior to you suppose, with Samsung right now announcing a feature for its Bixby mobile assistant that lets customers clone their voice to reply cellphone calls. The thought is that if somebody calls you however you possibly can’t reply aloud you possibly can sort out a response and it’ll be learn in a simulacrum of your voice.

Some caveats right here: this function is just at the moment accessible in Korean because the Bixby Customized Voice Creator app for a small variety of Samsung handsets (the brand new Galaxy S23, S23+ and S23 Extremely), which implies we’ve been unable to check it ourselves. The voice high quality is likely to be abysmal and response time too gradual to be helpful. However cloning voices to reply calls is nicely inside the scope of present know-how, with AI instruments capable of create realistic copies of voices from just some minutes of audio.

Answering audio calls through a textual content interface isn’t new both. On Samsung gadgets the function is named Bixby Textual content Name, and was launched with the corporate’s One UI 5 pores and skin of Android. It was beforehand solely accessible in Korean, however is now accessible in English utilizing a generic synthetic voice (and solely with variations 5.1 of One UI). Google affords the same service known as Call Screen which helps you to reply to potential spam calls utilizing an automatic voice. Although Google’s service solely helps you to choose from an inventory of generic responses reasonably than typing out customized replies.

It’s not exhausting to think about these options changing into extra advanced and automatic within the close to future. In spite of everything, you may simply join a text-to-speech voice clone of your self to a chatbot like ChatGPT or (should you have been feeling particularly chaotic) Microsoft’s Bing. Samsung itself guarantees that customers’ generated voices can be “suitable with different Samsung apps past cellphone calls” sooner or later, although it’s not clear what which means.

You would ask such a bot to summarize the contents of your name or simply waste a spammer’s time should you have been feeling petty. Tech corporations have lengthy promised that AI assistants will be capable of perform this form of admin on our behalf, and making a voice clone of your self and setting it duties through a chatbot might really make this pitch a actuality.

We’ll be watching how this tech develops and can attempt to check out Bixby’s voice options for ourselves after we can. However while you choose up the cellphone within the close to future you’ll have to ask your self: is {that a} actually a human on the opposite finish?