Just when you thought you couldn’t possibly stomach another story about the shortfalls of A. I., along comes a story of how the human creators of artificial intelligence failed…
…and not the actual tool they created.
In an attempt to increase my productivity, especially as far as creating video content goes, I’ve been turning to A.I. for solutions.
Finding the right text-to-voice software has been tops on my list for quite some time, as I’ve always found audio to be the biggest hurdle when producing video.
You see, even with a script in front of me, I have quite the remarkable tendency to screw things up. Even with a script, the odd uhm or uhh manages to slip in there.
So then began my journey. I wanted to seek out an artificially generated voice I could call my own.
If you happen to be in the market for exactly that kind of product yourself, let me tell you – there is no shortage of options.
Your criteria boils down to the following:
How robust is the voice you’ll be using?
How many options of voices does the software offer?
Is the pricing right?
Despite the fact that we are all hearing about A.I. non-stop these days, the industry is still very much in its infancy.
Some of the software I test drove really didn’t hold up. The voices were every bit as robotic as the system generating them.
Those voices lacked warmth and generally anything organic detail that is characteristic typical human speech – I say typical because there are some unfortunate souls out there who sound just like robots when they talk.
Finally, I happened upon MURF.
Of all the software I had tried to date, this one appeared to be the gem.
The voices were not only as warm as one would expect when a fellow human talks, they were also malleable.
Then came the price. Could be better, but could also be a lot worse.
After running a few more tests on MURF, I was almost ready to pull the trigger.
That is, until I decided to have myself a little bit of fun. Before reaching for my wallet, I got wily and started playing with some of the female voices.
I got them to pretty much scream out the words and sounds you’d expect from anything you’d find on Porn Hub.
It was actually quite funny.
Then I got up to grab a drink of water, and by the time I got back to my desk, I had received an email from MURF that I couldn’t believe.
It read as follows:
—-
Hello!
Thank you for using Murf’s platform for your content creation needs.
This email is regarding one or more of your projects that violates our Terms of Service concerning the usage of our platform. Our system has detected content that might be inappropriate, profane, defamatory, obscene, or indecent in nature.
In the interest of protecting the rights and integrity of our voice actor partner community, our Terms of Service restricts Murf Studio users from creating such content. Please refer to our Terms of Service to know more about our content policies.
To the best of your knowledge, if your script includes any words or phrases which violate our Terms of Service, we request you to remove such content from Murf Studio projects.
However, If you believe that your project does not contain any inappropriate words or phrases and our system has incorrectly tagged this, kindly contact us at ————@murf.ai
If you have already made changes to your content, kindly ignore this mail.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your continued support in the journey.
—-
Well then, thank you MURF, for helping me with my choice!
Like I said, MURF’s pricing is pretty decent, but if they’re going to censor how you use the software, it instantly becomes overpriced.
Not quite sure what MURF hopes to accomplish with this rule, other than to turn off busy creators who need a hand in production.
Finally, I settled on Speechelo.
Not bad at all.
I do have to say however, that I don’t care for the fact that upon initially purchasing the software, you find out you have to pay for an upsell to access the larger portion of their voice library.
Still, it gets the job done and there is no fucking censorship – you can produce whatever content you want with it.
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