When considering embarking on new adventures, starting new enterprises, or simply purchasing exciting new items, there’s often a barrier to entry – sometimes many – of one sort or another. New products and services need to make their case to their customers on why they should be chosen, bought, or subscribed to.
There are many different factors that go into our decisions to make particular purchases. Sometimes we want reassurance, at other times a sense that our decisions have a basis in trusted reality, and perhaps we’d like there to be a community to connect with, so the start of our journey feels supported and comfortable.
If you’re wondering whether Dudley Editions train AI on your voice, the short answer is no. Here’s why, and how we look after your voice data.
Why trust matters in personalised audiobooks
Personalised audio and its use to create audiobooks in the voices of our loved ones remains somewhat pioneer territory. Hearing a story read in the voice of a parent, grandparent, or partner is a lovely idea, and as we drift inexorably towards the ever-lengthening holiday season, people are thinking about it as a gift.
It quickly becomes a community activity, though, with the creation of a personalised audiobook the gateway into sharing it with people you want to connect and reconnect with through storytelling.
To build confidence with potential customers, one of the things that we at Dudley Editions need to demonstrate and embody is trust-promoting behaviours keeping individual privacy and security at the heart of our offering.
How some voice services reuse your voice
One potential barrier that comes up from time-to-time is around the use and re-use of people’s voice data that’s central to creating the personalised version of their chosen story. A voice feels personal in a way that other data might not; it’s how your friends and family recognise you. Before you record anything it makes sense to ask where that recording goes and what it might be used for.
Services exist that capture people’s voices and use them to enhance and develop AI technology voice. These services are often commercial offerings that incentivise people to “bank” their voices and pay them when people choose their voices in the creation of voice-overs or other agreed reuses. These services are often clear that the re-use of voices for AI data model training is part of the trade-off.
Does Dudley Editions train AI on your voice?
Dudley Editions chooses not to do this. When you provide your voice sample to create your personalised version to share with your network, we don’t reuse that voice data for other purposes. It’s a one to one relationship between the provision of the voice sample and your choice to create a personalised audiobook or audiobooks. There’s no provision for that voice to be reused for AI data model training data.
What you record, and who handles it
To create your voice, you read a short script that we provide in the app. We wrote it deliberately so that your recording contains nothing personal beyond the sound of your voice: no names, addresses or details about your life.
We work with ElevenLabs, a specialist voice technology provider, to produce narration. We have switched off data use for model training on our account, so the voice recordings our customers provide are not used to train their AI models either. A promise about your data only means something if it covers everyone who handles it.
Why we keep it simple
We feel that a simple approach like this promotes transparency and builds consumer confidence.
In the complex world of AI technologies, it’s better to pare things back and demonstrate things in the simplest possible terms. There’s a time for complication and a time for simplicity; when it comes to personal storytelling and capturing moments to be cherished over time, we think straightforward clarity is the best way.
Voices that connect families and communities
Our focus from the outset has been on how voices can connect individuals and communities through powerful storytelling. We know that this has many applications, such as memorialising voices, collecting voices, accents and dialects that may be at risk of loss, and making sure we have captured the voices that are important to us across our family networks. There is the potential for these voices to be used in lots of different and memorable ways.
But we need to do this in responsible ways or people will simply not adopt the services and technologies we offer. That’s why keeping the messages on safe handling of voice data is fundamental, now and in the future.
Building trust in personalised audiobooks
We think that personalised audio represents an exciting new way for stories to bring new and renewed connections to our social lives. But we recognise the responsibility we hold to act in trust-promoting ways. By keeping things clear and always striking the right balance between quality and safety, we are building an exciting new audience of personalised audiobook customers that are freshly energised by powerful stories, told by someone they know and love.