In the House of Lords of the British parliament on Tuesday, a speech delivered by artificial intelligence was heard for the first time. The author of the text and the initiator of the innovation was 67-year-old Jane Campbell, Baroness of Surbiton. She has suffered for many years from spinal muscular atrophy, a hereditary disease in which muscles gradually atrophy, including those responsible for speech.
During a debate on healthcare, Campbell used software that recreated her voice as it was before the worsening of the disease. "This is cutting-edge technology that will allow me to take part in debates in my own, once clear voice - before it began to deteriorate because of my condition," she said, addressing the chamber.
Before the speech, Campbell received permission from the procedure committee, which monitors compliance with the rules of the House of Lords. As the chamber's press service recalled, in 2012 the same committee allowed her to bring a personal assistant into the hall so that he could read out her speeches. That was a departure from a 1707 rule forbidding persons who are not peers from being on the floor of the chamber.
To recreate her voice, Campbell turned to ElevenLabs, a company specializing in the synthesis of naturally sounding speech. According to company employee Gabi Leibowitz, Campbell "spent a short time working on a voice clone to fine-tune it and make sure it sounds exactly the way she wants and is perceived as her authentic voice before the illness."
Although 30 seconds of audio recording may be enough to create a clone, the company recommends recording from 30 minutes to an hour - that way the quality is better. The technology also allows "emotional tags" to be inserted - instructions that control the intonation of the reproduced voice. Before the advent of AI, Leibowitz notes, a person would have had to record almost 400 sentences while he had not yet lost his voice. But even then the result sounded "relatively robotic, without feeling and in only one language."
Campbell has battled a severe illness since birth: at the age of one, doctors predicted that she would not live to the age of two. She later became a prominent campaigner for the rights of people with disabilities, and in 2007 she was appointed to the House of Lords. She sits as an independent crossbencher - that is, she does not represent any political party.