It's really easy for a technical person to do as well.
I use Coqui TTS[0] as part of my home automation, I wrote a small python script that lets me upload a voice clip for it to clone after I got the idea from HeyWillow[1], and a small shim that lets me send the output to a Home Assistant media player instead of using their standard output device. I run the TTS container on a VM with a Tesla P4 (~£100 to buy) and get about 1x-2x (roughly the same time it'd take to say it, to process) using the large model.
Just for a giggle, I uploaded a few 3s-5s second clip of myself speaking and cloned my voice, then executed a command to our living room media player to call my wife into the room; from another room, she was 100% convinced it was myself speaking words I'd never spoken.
I tried playing with a variety of sentences for a few hours and overall, it sounded almost exactly like me, to me, with the exception of some "attitude" and "intonation" I know I wouldn't use in my speech. I didn't notice much of an improvement using much longer clips; the short ones were "good enough".
Tangentially, it really bugs me that most phone providers in the UK insist you record a "personal greeting" now before they'll let you check your voice mail box, I just record silence, because the last thing I want/need is a voicemail greeting in my voice confirming to some randomer I didn't want calling me, who I am and that my number is active, even more so knowing how I can clone any voice to a reasonably good accuracy with just a few seconds of audio.
I use Coqui TTS[0] as part of my home automation, I wrote a small python script that lets me upload a voice clip for it to clone after I got the idea from HeyWillow[1], and a small shim that lets me send the output to a Home Assistant media player instead of using their standard output device. I run the TTS container on a VM with a Tesla P4 (~£100 to buy) and get about 1x-2x (roughly the same time it'd take to say it, to process) using the large model.
Just for a giggle, I uploaded a few 3s-5s second clip of myself speaking and cloned my voice, then executed a command to our living room media player to call my wife into the room; from another room, she was 100% convinced it was myself speaking words I'd never spoken.
I tried playing with a variety of sentences for a few hours and overall, it sounded almost exactly like me, to me, with the exception of some "attitude" and "intonation" I know I wouldn't use in my speech. I didn't notice much of an improvement using much longer clips; the short ones were "good enough".
Tangentially, it really bugs me that most phone providers in the UK insist you record a "personal greeting" now before they'll let you check your voice mail box, I just record silence, because the last thing I want/need is a voicemail greeting in my voice confirming to some randomer I didn't want calling me, who I am and that my number is active, even more so knowing how I can clone any voice to a reasonably good accuracy with just a few seconds of audio.
[0] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [1] https://heywillow.io/