Music Ally wrote about Australian startup Replica earlier this year, following its participation in the Techstars Music accelerator. The company is using AI to create ‘Replica voice actors on demand” – taking recordings of someone talking, and creating a ‘replica’ voice capable of reading any text fed to it.
For musicians, the company pitched the tech as providing “the ability for individuals and artists to licence their own voices at scale — creating new revenue streams for themselves that can scale… maybe you’ve bought tickets to attend a music event and every fan gets a personal message in the artist’s voice”.
Anyway, Replica now has some financial backing to continue developing its technology. The company has raised a $2.5m funding round from investors in the US and Australia, according to news site SmartCompany.
CEO Shreyas Nivas has also been stressing that Replica’s work shouldn’t be seen as ‘deepfake’ technology. “We’re the exact opposite of a deepfake company,” he said. “We don’t want to be impersonating people without their permission.”
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