Imagine the possibilities opened up if you could create an AI voice from a minority language that was previously unwritten! I’m planning to update this post as I learn more.

At the moment (March 2023), this is beginning to look like a possibility in the near to medium future.

What can be done already?

1. It’s possible to clone a voice with a short piece of audio recording.
2. It’s possible to generate any output with that voice given the (written) input language.

What steps would be required to generate a voice from an previously unwritten language, without having an extensive training corpus?

The details I need to investigate more, however it might need to include:

1. Codifying the language and creating a written script, perhaps using IPA at first.
2. Recording a voice that can produce all the required phonemes of the language.
3. Writing text in the minority language in a suitable script that can be used as the input for the voice generator.

 

Review of current AI voice generators

https://murf.ai/

https://play.ht/

AI Voice Generator and Voice Cloning for Text to Speech

https://typecast.ai/

https://uberduck.ai/

https://beta.elevenlabs.io/