In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved.
But is it that different than the podcasts voices Google already generate with NotebookLM since a while ago?
I used Notebook LM to create a ten minute podcast but it took a lot of repeated attempts with tweaks of the prompt to make sure there was no stupid mispronouncing. Even the final product required editing out two words which were not even human (just glitches).
Not understanding pronunciation of words is to be expected, especially when they are acronyms but sometimes it was really dumb grammar.
Still very impressive but not quite there yet.