Text-to-speech is a heavily used and very useful technology, but it doesn't often bring tears to our eyes while reading to us. Finally! AI can grieve just like we do.

Now, this AI is not actually grieving, it is not only reading the words you give it, but also performing a speech synthesis process that simulates the emotion of acting. in the age of CGI and deep faking, computer simulated voice acting is the next problematic It was probably the next item on the list. [Sonantic's deep learning researcher Felix Vaughan says. And the first thing we focused on was grief."

You can see for yourself in the video below; Sonantic says the voices of the mother and daughter in the video are "completely computer generated." Take a look. It's pretty wild.

The video also features Sonantic's creators. The process involves real human actors who help build Sonantic's artificial voices, one of whom also appears in the video; the actors who work with Sonantic "use their synthesized voices in commercially released projects for clients around the world. and generate passive income by using their synthesized voices in commercially-released projects for clients around the world," the website states.

Meanwhile, users can import a script, choose from a selection of "voice models" to perform the dialogue, and swap between different voices with "just a few clicks."

They can also "direct" the AI, adjusting their performance through emotional intensity, projection, tempo, and other adjustable settings.

This technology can also be used to "direct" the AI.

This technology seems pretty neat, but not because of how acting or directing works. Actors are not a bunch of sliders and knobs, and acting direction is not done by tweaking a few settings. I can definitely understand the appeal for game developers to be able to change dialogue and adjust the tone of the acting at the last minute. It is odd to boil it down to assigning numbers to an "Emotion" meter on a website.

But this is our strange and troubling future, and it is clear that we will all eventually be replaced by computers. Perhaps a computer is writing this article. Maybe the computer is reading this article. There is no way to tell.