Hello everyone!
I came across this site offering digital voice over for animation, among other things, and I must admit that i am very impressed by the voices quality.
LOVO - AI Voice Generator & Text to Speech
Voice over is a necessity for many Blender productions and I wonder if this is the future of voice-over for indie productions, also, I would like your opinion on the subject!
I would love to see some vocal puppetry solutions. Text to speech is impressive, but it is hard to get nuance.
I can do all the voice acting myself (I may not be very good, but I can) , but I can’t do a range of different voices or accents.
It would be nice to record the performance you want, emotionally etc and then change the voice to another character.
I don’t know why this doesn’t exist yet. I feel like the above solution with Lovo is actually a harder task.
I agree, it would be nice to record a session in your own voice, with all the emotions and such, and then just change your voice to a new voice, I have no idea if such a thing exists or is in development, I looked it up but found nothing! 
As for Lovo, it’s simple enough, you upload a script, choose the voice you want, then you download a wav file, really simple, I will try it for my next tutorial, as it seems easier than recording my own voice over.
From what i understand, they are planning to add control over emotions in the near future, so my guess is that will be done through the script you upload, again, my guess is that they will use tags wrapped around part of the text where you specify a certain level of emotion!?
Right now the quality of Lovo’s voices seems very impressive, and they say they will make it so we can use these voices for animated films, if that’s the case, I think this could be very interesting.
The people behind Descript have this figured out. Their tech is able to edit audio as if it were text, and NEW words can be introduced as well. So you record your own voice, and the text is transcribed to text. With the standard version it will allow you to edit the text and remove parts, or add new parts that weren’t there originally.
They have the AI in place to replace the entire audio with a new voice as well, as long as the AI has sufficient sample voice data to work with. And the original intent and expression is left intact!
Now, before you get all excited: the company decided to block the general use of this, and they have to be contacted before they allow anyone to change a voice for another one.
The reason is clear-cut as crystal: if anyone could replace their voice with someone else’s, just imagine the pandemonium by those who abuse this. You could take the voice of any celebrity, and use those voices in your work. What about copyright? Or worse, fake news creators would have a field day with this.
Can you copyright a voice?
As to misuse for fake news, that genie is probably well and truly out of the bottle. I imagine who ever you don’t want to have access to technology like this already has access to technology like this.
The phrase the camera never lies, whole never completely true, is well and truly dead.
So open it up for the rest of us, I want Al Pacino to be a cohost on my podcast
Less facetiously, I’d be happy enough with a bank of generic different voices, based on every one, but no one in particularly
Lovo basically allows that, just look at the videos, there is also LyreBird, a Montreal-based company that allows the creation of any voices from a sample, not sure you could use a different voice than your own, but the technology is certainly there!
Lyrebird is text based as well
You are only supposed to use your own voice 
, but what’s the point of that, I have that already.
They do have generic voices too, which I have used. The free plan is quite limited, 200 characters of speech. And the most basic paid plan is quite expensive. $50 a month.
However, the technology is here, just not fairly distributed yet
Hi Folks!
My name is Tom, and I’m a co-founder of LOVO.
Can’t believe it’s already been more than a year ago since I chanced on this post (I didn’t want to jump in then, in the fear that I would interrupt honest criticism), and I can proudly say that we’ve come a long way in terms of our features, voice, and team - you should check us out again 
I also wanted to let you all in the thread know that we are launching a #madewithlovo video contest next week. More details will become available on our website www.lovo.ai this weekend.
What’s even crazier is that the animation used in one of our most recent videos is actually from Blender - allowed by Blender’s CEO Ton Roosendaal himself - so it’s great to be back here!
Please reach out if you have any questions!
Just opened up our event page www.lovo.ai/event!
you can win up to $1,200 in cash + get your content featured on our website
Did he? Or did he just confirm that the works are already licensed in a way that would permit your use of them?
To anyone reading this thread:
Under no circumstances should you enter a “competition” with bullshit like this. It’s not a competition, it’s an invitation to do work for free and MAYBE you’ll get lucky and be grossly underpaid for you
work.
As for the product itself. It clearly sounds like text-to-speech. The cost of sounding cheap is worse than paying/collaborating (depending on project goals) with a human being.
Hey Ben,
We had an email communication where he “confirmed Spring has been released as Creative Commons Attribution” - so if you were to nitpick, I guess you are right
This is the first time we are running a user-generated content contest, so I’ll take this poignant feedback and improve our ensuing campaigns. Thanks for taking the time to read through our event page!
Hope you and everyone else reading this thread have a wonderful weekend! 
if there was a way to “direct” emotions it would be great for animations. i already find the quality good enough otherwise. but i wouldn’t really pay for it. i hope there will be something like oidn for voices.
Hi Kakapo,
Thanks for the feedback! We actually just wrapped up our r&d to add emotions like laughing, crying, shouting, being angry, etc. Don’t think it’s ready to be publicly available yet (UI&UX + cost related), but will be out before EoY!