“Among the new releases on Audible are books read by Edward Herrmann, who you might know from his work in Warren Beatty’s Reds or Oliver Stone’s Nixon or Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator or The Gilmore Girls. Herrmann has been dead for ten years. His family gave tapes of his voice to DeepZen, a London-based AI startup. DeepZen is working with a variety of voices to master the full range of human intonation. The results are impressive.
The Wall Street Journal wrote about Edward Herrmann’s books and the intersection of AI and audiobooks. It presented a sample of a DeepZen audio voice and a real voice reading the same text and asked readers to guess which was which. I listen to a ton of audiobooks and consider myself quite sensitive to voices: I guessed wrong”