This deepfake AI can mimic voices of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and more

What if there was a way you could wish your best, who a Harry Potter fan, in the voice of Alan Rickman on her birthday or congratulate your baby brother on his promotion in the voice of billionaire Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or surprise your sister on her baby shower by wishing her in the voice of Betty White? Though it seems impossible, it isn’t. Enter: Vocode.

Vocode is a software powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that generates voices of dozens of celebrities, politicians and tech entrepreneurs. The list includes names such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Alan Rickman, Betty White and Christopher Lee among others.

Using Vocode is extremely simple. All you need to do is select the celebrity whose voice you want the AI to mimic, write what you want the AI to say and hit on the Speak button. What happens next is nothing short of magic. You hear the voice of the celebrity saying what you ordered them to.

While things do sound nearly flawless, but this deepfake voice generator program does have its limitations. For starters, it cannot read everything. I tried making the AI read, “Tesla CEO Elon Musk loves to share his views on Twitter,” in the voice of Sam Altman and it conveniently left out the word ‘Elon’ from the speech. Simply said, what it cannot pronounce, it leaves out.

Apart from this, not all voices are perfect. Vocode says that the AI can mimic some voices better than the others. In fact, the app has segregated the list of voices available in its database based on their quality. 

For instance, Sam Altman and Sir David Attenborough have been rated as the highest quality voice, which means the AI can mimic the listed voices with near perfection. In the ‘decent’ quality voices are voices of celebrities such as Alan Rickman, Bill Gates, Betty White and Bill Clinton. Poor quality voices include Mark Zuckerberg and Hillary Clinton while the ‘terrible’ quality voices include Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger among others.