Voice "Cloning" is Style Transfer
Artificially generated speech is increasingly embedded in everyday life. Voice cloning in particular enables applications where identity preservation is important, such as completing a recording, dubbing in a new language, or preserving the voices of individuals with speech loss. However, in our work, we find that despite the term, voice cloning does not faithfully ''clone'' an individual's voice. Instead, we find that widely-used voice cloning models systematically apply style transfer to source voices. As rated by human annotators, cloned voices are perceived as more authoritative, warm, customer-service-like, and human-like compared to their sources. Human annotators also report greate...
| Authors | Kaitlyn Zhou, Federico Bianchi, Martijn Bartelds et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 15 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 October 2026 |
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