I Cloned My Voice🎤 — My Dad Thought It Was Me!😲

Scary and Hilarious Results — Including Audio

Addison Best

Published in

Generative AI

8 min readJul 2, 2024

I cloned my voice with an open-source voice-cloning model — and ElevenLabs AI Voiceover Studio

I’m going to show you the audio files I used to train the models — and the final results

Listen to the audio — You won’t be disappointed 😲

AI voice clone ElevenLabs Voiceover Studio — AI voice clone — Dalle-3

I’ve been making more videos recently that are mostly slides with voice-overs.

I wanted to see if I could save some time in the video creation process — by cloning my voice to use in some of these videos.

I’ve heard great things about ElevanLabs for AI voice cloning — but that is a paid service.

So I wanted to see if I could also hack together some open-source voice cloning projects from GitHub to compare.

I found one called Tortoise

So in this tutorial, I’ll compare cloning my voice on Tortoise and Elevenlabs

Voice Cloning Audio Inputs

The first thing you need to do for any voice cloning software is use a sample of your voice — you need this to train the voice cloning software and make a cloned version of your voice.

I’m hoping to use my cloned voice for some video tutorials potentially.

So the voice training sample I used to train the models was an actual clip from a tutorial I made on YouTube.

I used these two sample clips from the YouTube video to train Tortoise.

You can also look at the full Google Colab project below — if you are a nerd like me🤓

Google Colab Open Source Voice Clone

If you aren’t interested in the Google Colab explanation — skip to listen to the results.

How to Clone Your Voice with Tortoise

You need to click on the Play button for each of the Headings:

Install Packages — This installs all packages. It takes a few minutes to run and you need to wait until it is complete.

2. EDIT output ‘text’ and ‘preset’ quality then RUN — See the screenshot highlighted in yellow below. You need to upload a sample of your voice in .WAV format. You can also edit the text of what you want your cloned voice to produce.

Screenshot of highlights of where to edit the text for your Voice Clone

The text I’m using for the result is below. This is the audio that will be generated from your cloned voice. So you can change the text to anything and your AI voice clone will say it.

The reason that I chose this text, is because this is from a YouTube transcript of another video I made. I wanted to see if the cloned voice sounds like me with my natural spoken dialog. There are some errors in the actual text but that doesn’t matter.

# This is the text that will be spoken.
text = “all right I’m going to show you guys a wild technique to turn Chat gbt into a great graphic designer like Photoshop and Canva and they can make anything for you and you might be looking at the background right now and thinking you know what’s all this about did did chat GPT do that and the answer is yes um I’m going to show you exactly how I did it using chat gbt only to create this background image and you could do this for anything social media your YouTube thumbnail in this example which this is and you can do a lot of cool techniques now with chat gp24 “

3. Generate Audio File (clone voice) 👌 — Just click the play button and listen to the result on Google Colab or download the file.

Audio Result — AI Voice Clone from Tortoise

My Honest Opinion.

Hilarious!…lol

I noticed a couple of things. I am Canadian and talk much slower than the cloned voice results.

I found it made me sound like someone from the Southern US and the pacing and tone of my voice was completely off.

It was also difficult to understand some of the words in the dialog.

So realistically I wouldn’t use it for this reason alone.

There are settings to play around with to potentially improve the quality of the voice clone — but the biggest issue for me was the time to create it.

It took me over 15 minutes to create the voice clone.

This voice clone is only 110 words long

There are also different quality settings but I think this isn’t a realistic option for most of my needs.

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The next voice clone software I tried was from ElevanLabs.

I have experimented before with some of their voice models for text-to-speech — but I only really wanted to test the voice clone feature.

Unfortunately, this feature isn’t free so I paid for one month of the lowest package that offered voice cloning.

The voice clone option I did was from the VoiceOver Studio Beta.

I was able to upload the 8-minute video of my previous example into their sound clone tool.

There is a more detailed voice clone as well from ElevenLabs but it takes longer and I think I would have to pay more to try it. (but I’m guessing it does a much more accurate job)

How to Clone Your Voice in ElevenLabs Studio

Then upload a video or voice file to train your voice. A few minutes of your voice should be fine.

I used this full YouTube video (8 minutes long) instead of the audio clips used in the Tortoise example.

I uploaded the .MP4 video to Voiceover Studio

Where to put your voice sample in ElevenLabs — used for your voice clone

2. Add the text you want your voice clone to use. Here is the text I used:

all right I’m going to show you guys a wild technique to turn Chat gbt into a great graphic designer like Photoshop and Canva and they can make anything for you and you might be looking at the background right now and thinking you know what’s all this about did did chat GPT do that and the answer is yes um I’m going to show you exactly how I did it using chat gbt only to create this background image and you could do this for anything social media your YouTube thumbnail in this example which this is and you can do a lot of cool techniques now with chat gp24 that you could never do before and that’s the power of trying new prompting techniques because this didn’t even work before I tried it a few months ago and it couldn’t do it and the cool thing is it actually worked so it put my logo here the text and even that cutout image of me in the background which was all also partly AI generated but that’s on a different software um anyway let’s jump into the tutorial and show you exactly how we did this okay let’s first go over the assets that I have that you’re going to need for this project okay so let’s look at this is an Addison cutout I’m just going to upload it okay so this is me so you need some sort of a PNG background

Here is a screenshot of where to put the text you want your Voice Clone to use

Voice clone settings — I just used the defaults

Audio Result — AI Voice Clone from ElevenLabs

My honest opinion.

The voice clone is seriously impressive for the default settings with no changes.

I sent it to my family and even my Dad thought it was me. lol

The voice clone sounded a lot like me, but somehow again — the voice clone made me sound more American.

That was the only negative. (not that there’s anything wrong with that) lol

I am very impressed overall and will need to mess around with the settings to see if I can improve.

The pacing, tone, and everything sounded like me, and not like an AI voice.

Also, the cloned voice was created almost instantly with only a small delay — unlike the over 15 minutes for a shorter click it took Tortoise.

So the clear winner in the voice cloning test unfortunately was ElevenLabs. I was hoping the open-source free example would have been better.

I did leave the full unedited audio results. I would love to hear your comments.

I strongly suggest you try ElevenLabs VoiceOver Studio if you have any interest in making a clone of your voice and using it for your creative projects.

This article contains affiliate links. I don’t normally put affiliate links in my articles but I am impressed with ElevenLabs and this article took a lot of work to create. I don’t mind earning a small commission at no extra cost to you.

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