Spotify is partnering with OpenAI because it wants to clone podcasters' voices and translate them into other languages!
What if podcasters could flip a switch and instantly speak another language? That's the principle behind Spotify's new AI-powered voice translation feature, which plays podcasts in other languages using the podcaster's own voice.
The company has partnered with some podcasters to translate their English-language episodes into Spanish with its new tool, and has plans to release French and German translations in the coming weeks. The initial batch of episodes will come from some big names, including Dax Shepard, Monica Padman, Lex Fridman, Bill Simmons, and Steven Bartlett.
Here is one of Spotify's translations of an episode of Fridman's show:
The backbone of the translation feature is OpenAI’s Whisper voice transcription tool, which can transcribe English speech and translate other languages into English. But Spotify’s tool goes beyond speech-to-text translation — the feature will translate a podcast into a different language and play it back in a synthesized version of the podcaster.
OpenAI is likely responsible for the voice-reproduction part of this new feature as well. The AI company has made a few announcements since morning, including the launch of a tool that can create “human-like audio from simple text and a few seconds of speech samples.” OpenAI says it is intentionally limiting the widespread availability of this tool due to security and privacy concerns .
That's likely one of the reasons Spotify says the translation technology is only being tested with a "select group" of podcast producers. The company didn't specify how widely it plans to make the tool available or when it expects to do so.
Source of information: theverge.com
