“Voice Analysis Shows Striking Similarity between Scarlett Johansson and ChatGPT”, 2024-05-31 ():
Actress Scarlett Johansson’s voice bears a striking resemblance to OpenAI’s now-pulled “Sky” personal assistant, according to an artificial intelligence lab analysis conducted by researchers at Arizona State University.
At NPR’s request, forensic voice experts at the university’s speech lab compared the famous actress’s voice and speech patterns to Sky using AI models developed to evaluate how similar voices are to each other.
The researchers measured Sky, based on audio from demos OpenAI delivered last week, against the voices of around 600 professional actresses. They found that Johansson’s voice is more similar to Sky than 98% of the other actresses [so there were <12 better matches out of 600?].
Yet she wasn’t always the top hit in the multiple AI models that scanned the Sky voice.
The researchers found that Sky was also reminiscent of other Hollywood stars, including Anne Hathaway and Keri Russell. The analysis of Sky often rated Hathaway and Russell as being even more similar to the AI than Johansson.
The lab study shows that the voices of Sky and Johansson have undeniable commonalities—something many listeners believed, and that now can be supported by statistical evidence, according to Arizona State University computer scientist Visar Berisha, who led the voice analysis in the school’s College of Health Solutions and the College of Engineering.
“Our analysis shows that the two voices are similar but likely not identical”, Berisha said.
Berisha said while the study analyzed a vast array of subtle vocal features, it also zoomed in on several particular dimensions of each voice and teased out some differences.
The Sky voice has a slightly higher pitch than Johannson’s; the Sky voice tends to be more expressive than Johannson’s voice in the movie Her, and far more expressive than Johannson’s normal speaking voice; and Johannson’s voice is slightly more breathy than Sky’s.
But overall, the two voices have distinct parallels.
The researchers also analyzed the voices for likely “vocal tracts”, or what size throat, mouth and nasal passages would produce a particular sounding voice, and Sky and Johansson had identical tract lengths, they found.