The Bluetooth Lady Speaks! ‘Voice-Over Actors Will Be Artisans in the AI Age’

Now, the game is all audiobooks, all the time, for the Bluetooth Lady and, to some extent, major platforms like Spotify, which is experimenting with pricing tiers and bundles for these formats, and has just launched a new publishing program for indie audiobook authors.

“You gotta make some quick moves,” she says. “I started auditioning more in the commercial space and jumping into audiobooks, almost full time now.” Despite the fact that startups like Speechki offer synthetic voices for this exact use case, DiMercurio is fairly confident that AI won’t take over audiobook or scripted podcast voice acting anytime soon. “We’re in a space where, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You have this big, heavy tool—AI—and we’re just smashing everything we can see with it. It has stuck in certain arenas of voice-over, the ones that don’t need to feel extremely personal. But part of the reason why fiction podcasting became a thing was the intimacy of hearing a person’s voice in your ear.”

As an actor, DiMercurio is interested in how many emotions and “micro observations” you can pick up on just by the way someone says a word. Some actors trust their gut, or do an impersonation, and others look at voice granularly, observing, re-creating, and manipulating the speed of the speech, the inflection and the placement, to function as a set of “levers” for, say, producing different audiobook characters.

When it comes to voice-over more generally, she thinks AI is now passable and that we may get to the point where it’s almost as nuanced as talking to a person, but “I don’t think it will ever hit quite the same.”

In the short term, she expects a flattening in advertising audio, similar to the sudden homogeneity in graphic design a few years ago when it seemed like all brands started to look the same. “Almost every voice you hear, there’s someone behind that,” she says, “even the AI ones were a person who recorded that at one point.” But AI voices are designed to be palatable to the widest audience possible, “therefore we’re losing the specificity, the identity, the little quirks—like nobody’s s’s whistle like mine do. You don’t think about it, you don’t even hear it, because it’s so neutral.”

Ultimately DiMercurio predicts that voice actors will become a high-end refinement in some industries. “A human voice is going to become bespoke,” she says. “We’re going to become a luxury item, almost thinking of it like artisanship. So if you’re a luxury brand, you’ll have a real person’s voice instead of AI in your commercials and in your products. In the same way that you can get handmade ceramics and bowls or you can buy them from Wal-Mart.”

A now infamous case study showing the power of a single, distinctive human voice came last May when OpenAI was forced to pause the use of its Sky voice for GPT-4o, one of five initial voices for the chatbot. This came after Scarlett Johansson—yes, her—hired legal counsel, claiming that OpenAI had imitated her after she refused a request from its CEO, Sam Altman, to license her voice for the product and after Altman had tweeted this single-word tweet: her.