Barb Lyon
Voice Artist

I was approached by a company last week to record 50,000 words for their text-to-speech (TTS) engine. The stated use? eLearning for kids and young adults. The money wasn’t terrible, especially since I’ve had a down year in the eLearning voice over genre, but a few things immediately made me pause. First, the company name wasn’t visible or offered. Now, I had recorded a TTS engine years ago for my previous employer, before I went full time into VO. The project never fully lau

I just found out that those early recordings, my voice, may be used to train AI voice models. What?! Ten years ago, no one was thinking about artificial intelligence in voiceover. I certainly never signed anything allowing my voice to be used that way. And yet, here we are. My voice is in the can, and apparently fair game for a use I never consented to: AI voice training and possible cloning.