Joe Rogan did a unique and impressive interview with Steve Jobs on podcast.ai, enlisting AI technology.
The founder of Apple passed away in 2011, but that didn’t stop Joe Rogan from bringing his voice back to life using Artificial Intelligence.
“On this episode, I welcome a friend who is difficult to describe. I am fascinated by him, and I hope you will be too. He is weird and brilliant and something insufferable. But my guest today has made some of the best technological products of our age, and he is always pushing the envelope in innovation,” Joe Rogan said in his introduction during the podcast. “How is it going? Good to see you, buddy. It has been a long time since I have been on a show,” Jobs responded in a very calm and funny tone.
“It is great to be on the show. Your audience is so different from the normal Apple users, and that’s a good thing; it is cool,” Jobs added.
The podcast is almost 20 minutes long and listening to it, one cannot fail to notice its extremely smooth and natural flow, although the discussion between the two men does not seem relevant to current affairs.
Steve Jobs: The technology behind the podcast
Play.ht, a text-to-voice tool based on an artificial intelligence algorithm, was used to conduct this podcast interview. Peregrine, a text-to-speech model from the same company, was applied, the latest version of which can add a remarkable range of emotions to any sound.
To reproduce Jobs’ voice, Play.ht relied on online recorded excerpts originating from Jobs’ on-stage presentations about Apple. This explains his tone throughout the podcast and the limited topics discussed with Joe Rogan.
Peregrine works the same way as the well-known DALL-E tool, accurately duplicating a person’s tones and emotions.
According to the Play.ht, the peregrine is an ultra-realistic text-to-speech model for the missing modality in that new set of models: Generative Audio. “We believe in a future where all content creation will be generated by AI but guided by humans, and the most creative work will depend on the human ability to articulate their desired creation to the model”, the company explains.
“Our approach moves beyond the current technology by introducing a novel TTS method that can synthesize speech with a higher degree of realism, making it undistinguishable from natural speech as spoken by humans. And to achieve this we don’t rely on high-quality annotated data but the audio itself as it’s naturally uttered,” the company clarifies.
One of the founders of Play.ht, Syed Hammad even explained that if the recordings of Jobs were of better quality, then the voice of Apple’s founder would sound much more
AI guided by humans
“We wanted to push the boundaries of what is possible in the current state-of-the-art speech synthesis, we wanted to create content that can inspire others to do the same, and there was no one who inspired and impacted the technology world more than Steve Jobs, that’s why in the first episode we brought his voice back to life” podcast.ai which is powered by Play.ht notes. “At Play.ht, We believe in a future where all content creation will be generated by AI but guided by humans, and the most creative work will depend on the human’s ability to articulate their desired creation to the machine”.
“We are building that future, starting with a major building block of it which is the emotional and expressive human-like synthetic speech generation and ability to clone any voice with a perfect resemblance. We hope others are inspired by this work and start creating even more creative audio and video content using generative AI”.
