I do not personally prefer it, but a non-trivial number of individuals like video/audio presentations over writing.
1. don't (keep it silent);
2. recruit the original VA somehow;
3. recruit an alternative VA (who hopefully sounds close enough to the original to not be jarring);
4. splice voice lines together from existing voice lines; or
5. use text-to-speech.
Voice cloning is just Option 5 but with results much closer to Options 2 and 3.
Given that rights about ones likeness (Personality rights) are somewhat defined there might be a legitimate usecase here. For example, a user might prefer a TTS with the voice of a familiar presenter from TV over a generic voice.
But it sounds exceedingly easy to abuse (similar to other generative AI applications) in order to exploit end-users (social engineering) and voice "providers" (exploitation of personality rights).
I have their app on my phone and it will read articles in Burt Reynold's voice, Maya Angelou's voice & etc. I'm under the impression that they consented to this and their estate's are being compensated (hopefully).
If you're in the USA, your credit card company captures your biometric voiceprint without consent or even notification when you call customer service. This technology makes that pointless.
Last year I proudly said it was "two thousand and five" during a video take, and didn't notice it at the time. I was able to add the "twenty" using Descript.
A good reason to let any caller ID one does not recognize go to voice mail. Phones need an app that does voice-to-text-to-voice to prevent capturing the voice. I want mine to sound like Smeagol (LoTR).
