Today is World Voice Day, today we celebrate it. Its importance, its care, its magic, and its purely human essence—which sometimes seems we’re also banishing. Many ideas cross my mind, some apocalyptic. Initially, one might think the reason certain people opt for synthetic voices is because they’ll “save money,” “it won’t matter,” “no one will notice,” some will say, and “it sounds almost the same,” “I don’t see why it’s illegal,” “everyone copies,” others will claim.
Today, the human voice suffers the onslaught of clear displacement by those who use artificial intelligence arbitrarily, by those who use it to play and in this game profit from a unique and inherent value that isn’t compensated to those from whom it’s stolen. A game that isn’t funny, that threatens our profession and human essence, and even if it were just for play, it still couldn’t be used indiscriminately.
What will we celebrate on future World Voice Days?
The human voice unites us, connects us, distinguishes us from animals. The human voice emerges from our being and our soul, it dwells within and arises from us like a magical and sublime energy, in the form of words, songs, expressions, and sounds that allow us to understand each other, find each other, touch each other with heart, with fury, with sadness, with joy, with poetry, with counsel, and with all that we are, despite seeming to increasingly shy away from the fact of being human.
I hope a day for synthetic voice or a world day for artificial voice never comes to exist, because it’s not “almost the same.” Nothing to celebrate there.
Voice belongs to us, it’s part of our essence, a distinctive trait that allows us to recognize ourselves, it draws our personality in sounds and is perhaps the most important communication tool that exists, thus enabling the survival of cultures, languages, and customs.
We dedicate a day to celebrate something we are slowly silencing. While we applaud the importance of the human voice, we hide behind text messages and emojis to avoid the vulnerability of being truly heard. Voice reveals our insecurities, our half-truths, our contained emotions. Perhaps that’s why we avoid it. It’s more comfortable to type “ha, ha, ha” than to face the tremor in our voice when we lie or the involuntary intensity when something excites us. Typing withstands everything, voice does not. Voice breaks, overflows, exposes us.
In a world where authenticity has become a commodity, our voice remains fundamental in our relationships and communication. AIs can imitate tones, can simulate cadences, but they lack the personal history that has shaped our lives, they don’t and will never have the vocal micro-expressions that reflect lived experiences, they have no soul though “they may seem very similar.” We don’t face synthetic voices for labor competition alone, but because they represent a trivialization of something deep and complex. Every time we choose to use our genuine voice—imperfect, emotional, unique—we are making an act of resistance against the standardization of human experience.
Though artificial voices may exist, nothing will silence our voices.
We built a professional audio studio specially for Vero. The room has been acoustically tested with dozens of clients around the world.
