VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[audio'connell]

NBC Sports has decided that to promote the NBA on NBC next season, they will hire a new promo voice talent....except the voice talent has been DEAD since 2017.

Using AI and with blessing of the voice talent's family, NBC Sports will use the voice of their 1990's NBA on NBC voice talent Jim Fagan for elements (plural) of NBCs promos.

A dead guy. Not a live guy. And it's already started.

Read, hear and watch here: https://awfulannouncing.com/nba/nbc-ai-bring-back-original-promo-voice-jim-fagan.html

Ya can't make this shit up.
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- Peter
audioconnell Voice Over Talent
Your friendly, neighborhood voice over talent

[Bob Bergen]

Oh, this is not new. Just high profile, like James Earl Jones. Yup, this is going to happen more and more. But the world of on-camera and print has used a similar business model for years. If/when a dead celebrity’s image is used for advertising, their heirs must consent and the buyers must compensate. This AI vo usage will bring compensation to heirs for the first in this capacity beyond just a lift fee.

And, live vo actors will profit from AI as well. In the last animation contract negotiation we got management to agree that if our English version is used through AI to create foreign versions, we get applicable residuals. Historically, buyers have hired foreign language actors non-union. This keeps the work union. Now, it works both ways. The same tech will translate the original Japanese into English. But thus is the tide that is technology. You cannot stop the tide. You have to figure out how to work with it. Like all tech disruptions, some will be impacted worse than others. It was the last tech disruption, the internet, that eroded the union vo industry. The result is that vo is now 80% non-union. The irony is that it was the non-union community who trained AI. I predict in less than 5 years 80% of non-union vo will be AI. Which is why the union is doubling down demanding AI consent and profit sharing in every contract.That is the only guaranteed way to work with this technology.

Time clouds history, or rather how lives and livelihoods have been impacted with every tech disruption. Livery stables were put out of business due to the horseless carriage. People once set up bowling pins. ATMs cut into the hiring and need of bank tellers. Silent film put an end to vaudeville. Amazon put a lot of mama papa brick and mortar stores out of business. I could go on and on.

So, you don’t have to like how AI will impact vo. You have to accept it and find ways to work with it.

[todd ellis]

We've talked about this before. Eventually there will be one "voice actor" and it will be Matthew McConaughey with his estate controlled by his Great-Great Grand Daughter.
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"i know philip banks": todd ellis
who's/on/1st?

[Jack Daniel]

Out of curiosity I went to the linked site and listened to the old real voice and then the new AI version. There are huge differences in sound quality of course, given the limitations of earlier broadcasting and video tape, but the vitality and excitement of Fagan's real broadcast voice come through the lower fidelity and are largely lost in the higher-audio-quality AI version. It's like they cheesified his voice somehow, taking out the real love of the game and substituting announcery tropes and intonations to give the AI voice more heft at the expense of feel.

This isn't an "AI sux!" judgment on the use of AI in the instance, just on the quality of the voice in this rendition. Nostalgia relies on more than voice print. Great impressionists aren't usually perfect reproducers of a voice print, but rather great revealers of the spirit that animates the particular physiology of a particular person.

Anyway it's still early days for AI so I'm sure it will get better at approximating feel. And even human announcers are perfectly capable of delivering canned generality on a bad day.
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Jack Daniel
Narrator / Man About Town

[Bob Bergen]

[Jack Daniel]

If it's been 5 or 10 or so years, it's still early days, but I take your greater point. Still, my point is that the stuff being used in this case of reproducing Jim's voice is not "the good stuff." At least not from a VO's critical perspective. For most viewers, it might not matter that much in super small doses if the point is to evoke memories of a voice that already exists in your head and who earned a reputation through repeated excellence. But if gave that read I would be mad at myself for phoning it in--again, probably not the point of this use.

I do look at AI in the way you suggest, as something rapidly developing from its clumsy start. Hell, my first reads were clumsy and wooden, and I had the advantage of being alive for quite a spell. I'm just noting that this particular case is not one where emotional subtlety is on display.
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Jack Daniel
Narrator / Man About Town