AI Tom Hanks didn't offer me a job, but it sure sounded like he did

AI audio has improved-and this isn't even the latest model.

-  MARK HACHMAN

Tom Hanks didn't just call me to pitch me a part, but it sure sounded like he did.

Ever since PCWorld began covering the rise of various artificial intelligence applications like Al art (fave.co/3YnSzFq), I've been poking around in the code repositories in GitHub and links within Reddit, where people will post tweaks to their own Al models for various approaches.

Some of these models actually end up on commercial sites, which either roll their own algorithms or adapt others that have published as open source. A great example of an existing Al audio site is Uberduck.ai (fave.co/3WksFQF), which offers literally hundreds of preprogrammed models. Enter the text in the text field and you can have a virtual Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Peggy Hill, Daffy Duck, Alex Trebek, Beavis, The Joker, or even Siri read out your pre-programmed lines. We uploaded a fake Bill Clinton praising PCWorld last year and the model already sounds pretty good (fave.co/3aShWv8).

Training an Al to reproduce speech involves uploading clear voice samples. The Al learns how the speaker combines sounds with the goal of learning those relationships, perfecting them, and imitating the results. If you're familiar with the excellent 1992 thriller Sneakers (with an all-star cast of Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, and Ben Kingsley, among others), then you know about the scene in which the characters need to crack a biometric voice password by recording a voice sample of the target's voice. This is almost exactly the same thing.