How Automation Enables Creativity

The robots are coming to help you make cool stuff!

Image copyright is up in the air — it’s an AI generation, but maybe the author depending on how all of that goes

I saw an ad a while back. It was for voiceover work for video… but it wasn’t the usual kind of ad; it was for computer-generated voiceovers that are indistinguishable from human voice work. We’ve all heard this in practice — sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn’t.

A few years ago, I was working on a project and had to record some voiceover. Car makes and car models, numbers. All in all, it was a few thousand words. It cost thousands. I had to pay for studio time, a voice actor, and a sound technician. It also took many hours.

Current text-to-speech tools would allow me to do something like that for pennies, and that’s on the high side. That’s if I don’t use the tool advertised. If I use that tool, I don’t know, a few dollars? Maybe a few hundred. Not really sure. I’m pretty technical, so I would probably use a google colab notebook that did text-to-speech or one of the many open-source tools available for Linux.

As mentioned above, copyright uncertain

I have used my own photos for most of my Medium articles. Not all, but most. When I haven’t used my own photos, mostly it’s because I haven’t…