January 25, 2019
Neural TTS meant it became a lot easier to clone voices. We had also developed singing synthesis so we thought why not clone the President of the USA’s voice and have him sing as well. It seemed funny - at the time.
Our first satirical message was released to celebrate Burns Night. CereProc have always embraced the different accents of English and, given Donald Trump’s Scottish roots, we thought it would be fun for him to meet our Glaswegian speech synthesis voice Dodo. We could also get Donald Trump to sing - badly.
Later that year we made another message to celebrate Christmas and the new prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson. Again we both wanted them to sing, but this time a more festive song.
No one is laughing now.