Using AI Voice Clones to Assist, Motivate, and Complement the Work of Student Actors

In this short course I will present my findings from a pedagogical research study which explored how AI voice cloning technology might be used to assist, motivate, and complement the work of student actors. Specifically, the ability of the AI clones to reveal rhetorically dense and/or long text is superior to a majority of my students, based on my assessment of their first efforts at speaking dense text. The AI voice clone has been fed and taught to analyse the waveforms of hundreds of hours of spoken material. Many of our students have never been tasked with reading so much as the Gettysburg address out loud. I cannot compensate for the deficit of their secondary education. Nor can I stop the advance of AI voice products in the marketplace. But I thought perhaps we could use the machine to stay ahead of The Machine. If the technology can be used to speed up their perception of prosody in dense language and help them make more informed execution of the syntax spoken aloud, then they could spend more time on all the other acting exercises that need to be done.

This course will take you through the steps of the study and the results of both student self-assessment and my own measures of their work. Spoiler alert: the results were mixed. I explored whether listening to a clone’s performance helped the students to either recognize rhetorical structures on the page, or to hear them in action. We established baselines of understanding text from listening only and from reading only. We compared understanding a peer’s first performance to the performance of a selected clone. We examined the prosody of syntax as well as the longer patterns associated with keeping a progression of ideas clear and those prosodic choices associated with urgency of need. We listened to great performances of rhetorical persuasion and then listened as even the best clones attempted the same text. The culmination was having students clone their own voices to see if they might become their own best assistant.

I believe this course has immediate relevance to actors and those teaching and coaching them.  Those working with professionals who still persuade through language such as attorneys and politicians may find utility. This work could also be applied to those who coach business clients speaking varieties of global English. At a minimum, it is important to know how to inform and steer clients engaging this technology.

I look forward to your own questions and insights into this work and new avenues it might create.

🏷️ Price £30 (UK VAT inclusive)
🎥 Recording automatically sent to all who book (even if you cannot attend live)
▶️ Rewatch as many times as you like
📜 Certificate of attendance available