• Jedi Paul

  Economics Editor

The fears of many voice actors are starting to come true: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over part of their work. Companies are changing contracts, representatives are receiving emails saying that their services will not be needed soon, and a few have already been replaced by a robot voice.

Digital news kiosk Blendle is one company where hiring voice actors have been in limbo in recent weeks. At the beginning of this month, she informed the cast that she plans to stop using human voices effective January 1, according to an internal email obtained by NOS.

French parent company Cafeyn speaks of a misunderstanding. “We are experimenting with a text-to-speech model. If the results are good, we will stop using human voices,” admits a company spokesperson. “But nothing has been decided yet. Nothing has been decided before January 1 or any other date.”

Audio book company Storytel is also experimenting with AI voices that read books aloud. “These kinds of topics are discussed every day in our app groups,” says voice actor Machtild van der Gaag. “It is not possible to ban. We now have to look at how we can ensure that our conditions remain as good as possible.”

Out of concern about artificial intelligence, a group of voice actors founded the voiceover association Nedvo this year. Its membership now amounts to about 120 members.

In order to protect their work, they also work with Kunstenbund, the union of cultural workers and artists. “AI now plays a role in many creative professions, but voice actors are really coming into play,” says Kaspar De Kefte of Constanbond. “Preliminary member survey results show that 96 percent of voice actors fear AI will lead to job losses.”

De Kiefte wants to talk to companies like Blendle that are considering replacing humans with artificial intelligence. “We also want to appeal to them about their responsibility. These are self-employed people, who lost part of their income in one fell swoop, without a transitional payment or retraining money.”

Voice actor Jeroen Kramer has already experienced what it means to be replaced by an AI voice. He wrote twelve parts of a book series for an American publisher Magician’s ring in. “With the thirteenth book, I was replaced by the voice of a Flemish robot,” Kramer says. “He shouldn’t be listened to.”

Listeners thought the same way. It’s raining 1 star reviews In Part Thirteen. “Then I called the publisher to find out why they were doing it. It was basically a financial issue.”

“Dutch AI voices are not yet good enough for longer projects, such as audiobooks,” says van der Gaag, who cloned her own voice to see how far the technology has come. “There are still all kinds of weird accents in it and it’s still very flat.”

But there are very good AI sounds in English, van der Gaag says. Storytel already uses English-language AI voices for its own productions. This is how Henry’s AI voice reads English Hansel and Gretel For the science fiction novel Daniel, voiced by artificial intelligence Black star. AI voices should be added in Danish and Swedish before the end of the year, and then in other languages.

There appears to be a clause in the new contracts for Dutch Storytel readers indicating that the company wants to use their voices to create artificial Dutch voices as well.

It states that the company has the right to make “transcriptions and extractions” of recordings of voice actors. The voice actors NOS spoke to criticize this. One of them, who preferred to remain anonymous, said: “I’m really worried.” “But if I don’t sign, I won’t get the job. And I can’t get that paragraph out.”

But the Arts Association thinks differently. “We want to discuss with Storytel to see if it is possible to pass such a clause for all Dutch votes.”

“We will not reproduce narrator voices without separate dialogue and consent,” a Storytel spokesperson said in an email response. According to the spokesperson, the paragraph is needed for other technologies, “such as improving the search function, recommendations, and switching between narration and reading audio.”

Storytel also says that AI voices do not replace a human narrator. “It’s a plus. Users can choose between a narrator and additional synthetic voices depending on their preference.”