#158 How Game Localization is Trailblazing Speech Synthesis with Voiseed CEO

Voiseed CEO and Co-founder Andrea Ballista joins SlatorPod to discuss the machine dubbing startup’s approach to operating and developing their AI-based virtual voice engine, Revoiceit.

Andrea talks about how his passion for music as a child led him to founding audio localization studio Binari Sonori, which he sold to Keywords Studios in 2014, and why he is now launching Voiseed.

He shares his impressions from this year’s Game Developers Conference where there was a lot of interest in new technologies, voice cloning solutions, and the development of emotional synthetic voices.

Andrea unpacks Revoiceit’s ability to understand the voice and emotional profile of the user and transfer both profiles into the target language. Voiseed has been profiling vocal delivery and creating a data set, so the system can have a wider knowledge of human emotion in terms of voice and language.

On the topic of large language models (LLMs), Andrea is not worried about the implications of LLMs like ChatGPT as they have had two years to build a dataset on vast amounts of voice content. He talks about Voiseed’s early financial backers and shares the story behind applying for blended finance (grants and equity) from the European Innovation Council Fund and LIFTT.

Andrea shares his experience hiring during the lockdown and their approach to investing in ‘cool’ people and helping them grow through their incentive plan. The pod wraps up with Voiseed’s product roadmap, where they aim to improve features with more emotion control and work on how to create new voices that can be used in multiple projects.