Val Kilmer, the Top Gun star, has his own personal audio deep-fake, and it’s pretty remarkable.
The following written content by Eric Mack
The Iceman will not be silenced.
Beloved actor Val Kilmer of Top Gun, Tombstone and Willow fame, among many others, lost his voice — and his career — to throat cancer after a tracheotomy in 2014. In 2020, Kilmer turned to British AI company Sonantic to create a model of his voice, basically a custom-built audio-only deepfake for the actor’s personal use.
Sonantic creates voice models primarily for video games using actors who read hours worth of scripts. That audio is then fed into the company’s voice engine to build a model that can say anything on demand. But Kilmer’s case was trickier because there was little audio from his career available in a high-quality format and with minimal background noise.
A team cleaned up the available audio to remove as much noise as possible and attempted to build a model for Kilmer’s voice with only about one-tenth of the audio normally required. When the results were subpar, Sonantic developed new algorithms to work with less data and wound up creating over 40 different models of Kilmer’s voice. The team chose the best and most expressive one and now you can hear the results below.
Kilmer’s voice can be controlled by a desktop application that allows him to type whatever he wants the model to say and then fine tune aspects of the delivery like pitch and pacing.
“The ability to communicate is the core of our existence and the effects from throat cancer have made it difficult for others to understand me,” Kilmer said in a written statement. “The chance to tell my story, in a voice that feels authentic and familiar, is an incredibly special gift.” Read more from Cnet.
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