What is Generative Voice AI?
Generative voice AI is an AI-powered system that generates human speech. The AI system takes digital text and converts it to AI voice, similar to how AI chat synthesizes human text-based conversations. Generative voice AI can have intelligent, real-time conversations with users, answering questions, troubleshooting problems, or responding to phone calls.
What is a generative voice AI agent?
A generative AI voice agent is an intelligent system that can interact with humans in real time, both understanding spoken language and responding to audio inputs with audio outputs. It is an AI app that can have real-time audio or phone conversations with human users on complex scenarios, ranging from scheduling appointments to verifying information.
AI voice generator agents can streamline many customer service tasks, like answering FAQs, checking on the status of an order, solving basic queries, and scheduling appointments. If an agent cannot help with a customer’s query, they can also route calls to the appropriate department where a human agent can take over.
The extensive range of tasks that an AI voice generator agent handles helps to reduce strain on customer service agents. It improves the customer experience and ensures that human agents only manage complex queries that require more resources.
What are the benefits of AI voice?
There are numerous benefits to using generative AI voice in your operations.
Multilingual support
The best AI voice generator systems can work across dozens of distinct languages, instantly adapting to a user’s language to ensure they receive support in their native tongue. Customers receive a streamlined and personalized support service by adapting to different languages and even distinct local accents.
Increased personalization
An AI voice generator can instantly scan through available customer data to collect information on how each user prefers their support conversations. Users may want to engage with a voice with a certain tone, which is why the AI tool will adapt to this data in real time to generate speech with the best possible personalized service for that customer.
Scalability
Businesses that use an AI voice generator can scale their voice operations to meet demand when needed. AI systems can take on endless customer calls at once if provided with enough resources. The scalability of customer service with generative AI voice ensures businesses meet the demands of their customer base even at peak times.
What are the use cases of AI voice?
Here are some of the most common use cases of AI voice.
Customer service support
AI voice generators support 24/7 customer service that can work across numerous languages and ensure customers receive a consistently high-quality aid. They can also be used to proactively call customers for tasks like verification checks,
Home automation
Home automation systems like Amazon Alexa and others can help users by responding to questions, processing commands, and interacting with other home automation tools. For example, a user could ask their voice assistant what the weather today would be like, with the AI voice generator then searching the web for a response and delivering that information to the user.
Online learning
Another use case of AI voice is in online learning scenarios, allowing students to ask and answer questions using their voice when prompted. This speech technology is beneficial for students taking verbal exams, as they can practice as much as they want to ensure they’re ready for test day.
Another deployment of AI voice software in learning is within language learning. AI voice can listen to a student’s pronunciation, offering improvements and allowing them to practice without needing a human teacher. AI language learning tools can supplement other forms of learning to ensure that a student’s speaking is as good as their other language skills.
Data collection
Businesses can also use AI voice technology to collect information from customers in the form of voice surveys. AI tools can ask customers questions and rapidly gather feedback, helping streamline the data collection and collation process.
Interviews
Many businesses are automating their interview process by conducting early-round interviews with an AI voice generator. Businesses can select a range of questions that AI voice tools will use in the interview, giving a new question whenever a candidate has finished their previous response. An AI voice generator can ask candidates to expand on their answers if they need more information or ask follow-up questions related to the topic. HR managers can review these responses to save time and expedite the hiring process.
Voice acting and voiceovers
Another deployment of AI-generated voices is within professional voiceovers for videos and video generation. A realistic AI voice allows businesses to rapidly generate voiceovers for social media videos, informational showcases, demos, and on-site audio files. Equally, as these tools can work with multiple languages, they are an effective choice for businesses that want to reach a global audience with their video content.
As natural-sounding speech becomes more achievable with these tools, AI voice generators become a competitive choice when looking for voice actors. A realistic AI voice is also a more cost-effective solution, as companies can produce an entire audio file with just a few clicks.
What are the challenges with AI voice generation?
Here are some challenges that AI voice generators commonly face.
Prosody
Prosody is the natural rhythm of human speech, an integral part of language when conveying meaning. The same sentence can hold a variety of meanings, depending on where a person places the stress of the sentence. Disagreeing with someone, demonstrating empathy, and saying one thing while meaning another all rely on the prosody of a sentence.
Changes in intonation, pitch, volume, rhythm, and stress all have innate impacts on how language is perceived. Both accurately predicting and understanding variations in prosody are challenges for AI voices can limit understanding these tools in certain circumstances.
Natural-sounding AI voices
While an AI voice generator produces precise and enriched responses, it can still struggle with certain parts of creating a human voice. One of these is disfluencies, which are any interruptions in speech, like ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ or repeating words in a sentence, that are typical of realistic speech.
Speech disfluencies are atypical, without any set pattern of when they occur. Equally, they can occur differently in different people and arise in distinct situations. Due to this, it is difficult for artificial intelligence software to understand where to implement disfluencies to match natural human voice rhythms.
Ethical considerations of an AI voice generator
Businesses should take into account is that there should be transparency around using AI voice generators in customer experiences. The company should disclose any use of AI tools, especially as these AI voice generator tools become more effective.
How can AWS support your generative voice AI requirements?
Amazon Polly is an artificial intelligence voice generator that you can use to create high-quality audio files with human-like voices in dozens of languages and accents. For example, you can use Amazon Polly to:
- Convert PDF documents, web pages, and digital articles into spoken audio into dozens of languages and accents of choice.
- Integrate the Amazon Polly API into existing applications to bring voice-ready services to your platforms.
- Customize your output by adding custom lexicons, refining the pronunciation of complex vocabulary.
- Alter audio output using SSML tags to ensure your AI output perfectly suits your business.
Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. Powered by the same conversational engine as Alexa, Amazon Lex provides high-quality speech recognition and language understanding capabilities, enabling the addition of sophisticated, natural language ‘chatbots’ to new and existing applications. For example, with Amazon Lex, you can
- Enable conversational answers to commonly asked customer questions based on customer intent.
- Manage the conversation context directly without the need for custom code.
- Trigger functions for the execution of your back-end business logic for data retrieval and updates during the conversation.
Reduce multi-platform development effort and easily publish your speech or text chatbots to mobile devices and multiple chat services, like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, or Twilio SMS.
Get started with generative AI voice technology on AWS by creating an account today.