I have several tapes (yes actual cassette tapes) of my grandfather reading a novel.
Unfortunately a few of the tapes have degraded to the point that I cannot play them back.
I would love to recreate his voice, to “rerecord” the missing bits.
The recordings are in Danish.
Is this possible?
If it is, how can I go about it?
Maybe the term you are searching for is “AI voice cloning”. The engine of https://elevenlabs.io/voice-cloning claims to be able to understand and reproduce even Danish.
Edit: They seem to require some voice verification to make sure the voice is yours. Which is odd in your case.
https://speechify.com/da should allow to recreate the voice of “your beloved one”, at least they mention it on their German page.
I did sign up for ElevenLabs, unfortunately they cannot allow me to clone a dead persons voice, as per their FAQ:
You may only clone your own voice or a voice you have the rights to clone. For added security, when creating a Professional Voice Clone we require users to complete a Voice Captcha mechanism by reading a text prompt within a specific time to confirm your voice matches the training samples you upload for training. If there’s a match, your request is sent for fine-tuning. If not, you’ll have to reach out via our help center to have your voice verified manually.
Now I’m sure it wouldn’t be an issue to get the legal rights, but when I spoke to their support, they did not have any way to verify beyond the captcha.
Maybe https://speechify.com/da/ works. At least they mention the recreation of the voice of “your beloved one” on their German page.
If you have the equipment (mainly an Nvidia GPU that has the ability) doing voice cloning locally is the way to go if you keep running into legal issues. Plus being on your computer you may be able to tweak and try different methods to get the best results for your needs. A year ago this would have been a maybe, but there’s a lot out there to look at and try. See what others have done first in videos and such and follow their lead.
Just find A github project that does AI voice replication…it would be free
Check it
https://github.com/topics/voice-cloning
So e of these may have the advantage that you can use your voice as carrier for the words but they’ll come out sounding like him so you can do the same inflections he would have done.
Private Message me if you have questions I’d love to dig into this but I don’t read thread responses
There’s a lot of results for ai voice clone. I can’t personally speak to the effectiveness of them but it might be worth a look.
While tools exist, like people already commented, remember that the result may not be what you expect.
A recreation whether by AI or a skilled voice actor will have slightly different intonations, emphasis, tempo variations, pauses and lack of pauses that are not your granfather’s. It is very likely to feel flat and wrong in an unpleasant way.
I’ve been able to generate very good results with this open source project. You need a pretty good nVidia GPU, and it takes some time and tedious work to get it working they way you want it to:
https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts
Some voices sound exactly right. Other sound like a broken robot. The main reason I like it is that I can run it local without having to sign up for some stupid cloud service.
Looks very cool. I was unable to see anything regarding languages. Is it completely language independent somehow, or is it English only?
Voice cloning is still kinda early, especially in the open source area. Whatever you may find now or later (it’s a rapidly developing field), the first and most important step you should do is to digitalize the cassettes into actual audio files to prevent further degradation / loss. Make sure to back those files up too, preferably in the cloud I guess.
You should not need anything special to digitalize the tapes either. A simple cassette player with a 3.5mm audio output fed into your mic input on your computer and a recording software such as Tenacity should be enough (start recording on the program, then play the cassette).
