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Creative AI in 2025: A No-Hype Assessment (Part 2 of 3)

Kirby Ferguson

#2: AI Voice Synthesis

Welcome to Part 2 of my rundown of the creative AI that are useful right now. Click here to read Part 1.

The dark horse of generative AI is voice generation. In particular, I’m referring to a single platform here, ElevenLabs.

AI voice generation lets you enter text, choose a voice, and export narration. It mostly sounds real, but it also sounds generic. (Generic is a flaw of all AI generators.)

I wouldn’t recommend voice generation for your important projects, but it could be useful for less vital content, like instructional content or quick social media posts.

But that’s not the truly compelling feature of AI voice generation. What’s the most compelling is voice cloning.

Yeah yeah, I know, cloning voices seems a bit Black Mirror. Here’s the way I look at it.

Cloning someone else’s voice is wrong (unless you’re making comedy). But cloning your voice is potentially a big time saver. For example, Sarah Dietschy cloned her voice and appears to have gotten superb results.

To be clear, I don’t want to narrate videos with AI. If you use a voice clone for the entirety of your project, the listener will sense it and they will tune out – and probably leave with a low opinion of your work.

So what is voice cloning so useful for? For smaller tasks, like fixes and additions.

Making revisions to narration realistically takes 10 or 15 minutes, even for tiny edits. You have to get the recording equipment ready, record, export, import, and edit. With AI, you can type, export, import, done. Takes a couple minutes.

That is the killer feature of AI voice cloning: it lets you easily make fixes and additions.

Sidenote: another promising new platform is MMAudio. With this tool you can upload video, then it’ll analyze the scenes and add sound effects. It’s plenty quirky, but if it gives you usable results half the time, that’s a big win.

How to Get Started

If you’d like to get started with AI voice synthesis and cloning, ElevenLabs is in a league of its own. MMAudio is an interesting emerging platform that might appeal to video editors who need to add sound effects to your projects.