Meet “Reid-ish”: The Story of Cloning Reid Hoffman’s Voice

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1:28He's at his home office with a laptop open and a microphone set up. Two producers are standing by in their Zoom squares. Let me get the coffee and water. Actually, I guess coffee, not always great on the voice. Well, I still have a little bit of it. He settles into his chair and gets ready to record some voiceover for the show. Just making sure it works. Here we go. And then, this by the way, QuickTime, and two little pickups. Reed turns to the script and starts recording. Often, it's smooth sailing. But sometimes. That's Jesse Berry, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab.

2:30Reed is an investor, an entrepreneur, a philosopher, a patriot, and a great friend. But he'd be the first to say he is not a voiceover artist. Over time, the definition expanded to refer to anyone, real or imaginary, who serves as an...

2:56Recording voiceover can be time and labor intensive, even for the pros. At masters of scale, we might update scripts at any time as stories develop. So when Reed travels, which you can imagine is quite often, he takes a microphone with him, and he needs a super quiet space wherever he is. Good voiceover work also means getting into the right mindset. When you hit record, you have to match the tone of the story at hand, no matter what's going on in your life. Not to mention everyday hazards like a frog in your throat, a dog barking outside, or suffering from a cold that has you sniffling between sentences.

3:33But imagine you could ensure a result like this every time. No stumbles, no X-factors. Over time, the definition expanded to refer to anyone, real or imaginary, who serves as a source of inspirational fuel for the creative process. That is an AI version of Reid Hoffman's voice. About a year ago, Reid dove in to fully cloning his voice through a process powered by artificial intelligence. And like a lot of AI technologies, it has improved dramatically in a remarkably short amount of time. It's basically indistinguishable from human read, sitting in real time at the microphone. I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host.

4:20So we want to tell you the story of this technology, to take you under the hood to better understand it. You'll hear from Reed, from me, from our production staff, and from the voice cloning company we're working with, called Respeacher. Voice cloning is a tool that offers scaling potential for so many things, including this very show. It's also a tool with major implications we must grapple with, not just in audio, but far beyond. Well, we can talk about AI. When most people think about AI, they think about killer robots. Things are changing every couple of months. Thank you. Masters of Scale.

5:30I'm Jeff Berman, your host. One of the goals here at Masters of Scale has always been to democratize lessons in entrepreneurship, rooted in the experience of LinkedIn co-founder and legendary investor Reid Hoffman. We do in-depth interviews with business leaders. The scheduling of and preparation for those interviews can take months. After the interview comes an intensive process of editing, writing, sound design, and recording scripts of voiceover to connect the dots of the episode. The voiceover step can be tough for a lot of reasons. But now we have a full clone of Reed's voice. And we're exploring how to use it on Masters of Scale.

6:12This is a synthetic voice trained on the sound and cadence of Reed's speaking. Hi, listeners. If you're interested in experimenting with AI like we are, then I want to invite you and your team to join us this week on February 29th. It replicates his voice, but it doesn't generate original content. As an early adopter of new technology, Reed not only cloned his voice, he also made a generative video version of himself called Reed AI. Hello, everyone. I'm thrilled to be here today. I'm an AI-generated version of Reed Hoffman, his digital twin. my thinking, and everything I am saying comes from a custom GPT that is based on 20 years of Reed talking and making content.

6:53Reed appears on a split screen, going back and forth on camera with an expressive, vivid digital twin. So first, I'm going to challenge Reed AI with some questions to see what it can do. Let's take a real piece of work from me, blitzscaling. I wrote a 336-page book. And how do you explain it in one sentence to a five-year-old. For a five-year-old, blitzscaling is like building the biggest tower super fast before anyone else, even if it gets a bit messy, so you can be the leader of the tower game. As a listener, you might already be trying to figure out in your head which Reed is which. Is what you're hearing one of several synthetic versions, or is it Reed, live and in person?

7:35Well, I sat down with Reed, human Reed, to talk more about why he's exploring all of this so ambitiously. Ready when you are. Hi, Reid. Hi, Jeff. We are getting together after you released kind of a mind-blowing video of you interviewing an AI version of yourself and that AI version of yourself interviewing you. I'm curious how the idea for that came about. So the idea was, obviously, most of the time that people have been talking about digital twins, most of that discussion has been in the fear and, oh, my God, it's going to be the end of Hollywood and all this disaster and storm is coming. So the idea was to start exploring what some of the positive use cases are, sharing the journey, sharing the learning, sharing the exploration with an emphasis on what can be possible and what can be positive.

8:32But, of course, navigating concerns and experiences as well. For as long as you've been hosting Masters of Scale, I know it's been a labor of love, but there's a labor part of it. And so could you talk a little bit about what we're experimenting with a synthetic read AI voice? Look, if I can figure out how to have tools make it a lot more efficient for me in terms of how I'm doing work and all the rest, that's a good thing. I use a phone for that. I use computers for that. If you say, well, look, why am I using this? Well, because I can address a set of commentary that otherwise I don't have time for.

9:10Or I can show some lens into the future, which is helpful to our audience. or I can go into more depth and produce more content that hopefully some number of people will really like that I wouldn't have otherwise have time to do. Because by the way, I sometimes have somebody who writes a speech for me and I give the speech. And no, I don't go, and by the way, sentence X was from Susan and sentence Y was from Bob. I go, okay, I'm giving the speech And I've worked with a team to hopefully get it right. But like, you don't have to go, Susan generated line three and Bob generated line seven or GBD generated line 10.

9:50So when you think about taking a synthetic AI voice and being able to approve a script and then have it read and have it be indistinguishable for the audience, that feels like a tremendous use case here. A thousand percent. The general principle is if what you're doing is legitimately trying to do more or valuable things for other people, then I think you will be broadly on the right path. An AI voice clone allows Reed and Masters of Scale to fulfill our mission of getting more business lessons and storytelling out in the world. It does have trade-offs, and we'll get to those. But there's also value, including for our producers.

10:32Delivering successful voiceover is such a remarkable talent and skill. That's our Masters of Scale executive producer, Eve Trow. But there's also just the statistical probability that someone who has brilliant things to say and important lessons to share will be good at that specific skill of reading text from a page and delivering in the voice. It's very low. and it can take an hour to deliver a couple paragraphs. Oof, it's hard work. Also, there's the matter of vocal quality. Here's producer Alex Morris. I'm thinking about specific times where readers had a cold and we've said maybe we should pause recording because even though this is naturally organically read right now speaking, it doesn't sound like the read massive scale read voice that we know.

11:26then there are the last minute pickups. We're talking about accurate information here, whether it's a lesson on business or to get the pronunciation of someone's name. You may have to, and I have had to, wake up a host at a very odd hour, call someone, text them at two in the morning so that they can say three words so that the story going out can be accurate. And is that the best use of everyone's time and energy? To me, if there were a magic bullet that could change just those three words so that they could be correct in the host voice, I think that would be a good use of that magic bullet. Well, that magic bullet seems to be here, and it's courtesy of a company based in Ukraine called Respeecher.

12:12They're the ones who cloned Reed's voice, and they do not underestimate the impact of their work. The basic limitation of a human being in front of microphone is now removed. That's Alex Serduk, founder of Respeacher and their CEO. The idea for Respeacher started at an IT hackathon in Kiev. Most participants were focused on visual recognition, but Alex and his co-founder had a different goal. To create a very simple model that would let one person speak in the voice of another person. They won the hackathon, and a few years later, their model grew into Respeacher, a company that creates synthetic versions of actual human voices.

12:57A lot of their projects involve TV and movies, remarkably often bringing dead voices back to life. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's yours and honor to be here with you all on America's Got Time. We were on America's Got Talent in the voice of Elvis Presley. I have to tell you, we're going to do a couple of our biggest records for you now. You are at Super Bowl in 2021 in the voice of Vince Lombardi. Because it's not whether we get knocked down, but whether we get knocked up. Even actor Jimmy Stewart, whose voice has been revived for a bedtime story on the meditation app Con. Well, hello. I'm James Stewart.

13:48But, well, you can call me Jimmy. Tonight, I'm going to tell you a story. Respeacher works closely with companies that own these brands and intellectual property. And there are applications beyond entertainment. Respeacher helps individuals with medical complications. We can change quality of lives of people who have speech disorders. Back in 2022, we tried our first rough real-time models on patients with laryngectomy. And those who'd be in danger if their real voices were heard. You often need to anonymize victims of a crime for a documentary or whistleblowers. Usually it's being done with voice morphers, which make it sound bad, like really bad.

14:40It's really hard to understand the sound and emotions. From his home in Kiev, Ukraine, Alex can imagine Respeacher helping victims of war crimes tell their stories more safely. And he's proud of his company's ethics. He said they've had no reported cases of misuse, and they do not take clients for political ads. Last year, Reid hired the team at Respeacher to create a synthetic voice for himself. There are hundreds of hours of Reid hosting Masters of Scale, so data was not a problem. But Respeacher doesn't turn text into speech. That's the technology behind vocal assistants that might sound more robotic, like Alexa and Siri.

15:23Respeacher uses human voiceover artists who deliver the lines. We understood that, look, let's take from humans what they do best. Humans are amazing in performing because we were born with this vocal apparatus and use it on a daily basis. Voice-over artists perform with emotion, unique pauses, and other quirks in their voices. Then that audiophile gets a filter, powered by the AI model, to sound like the actual person you want to replicate. Here's an early draft of Reed's synthetic voice. For Isaac Newton, it was an apple falling from a tree that supposedly led in to formulate the law of universal gravity.

16:03A little stuffy, right? A bit off. Here's a further iteration from Reed's feature. For Benjamin Franklin, it was a key on a kite string struck by lightning in a thunderstorm that proved electricity could be transferred and stored. Deeper, more casual, more like Reed. The original use case for this was to make an audiobook. Specifically, Reed's 2023 work called Impromptu, Amplifying Humanity Through AI. So using an AI voice to record a book about AI makes sense, right? Listeners got the voice of Reed without the dozens of hours it would have taken him to record reading it. Here's a sample of how it turned out.

16:47My query to GPT-4 was not the first time I'd asked an LLM to create a lightbulb joke for me. Earlier GPTs can freeze up like an amateur at an open mic night. Reed. How many restaurant inspectors does it take to change a lightbulb? GPT-3. Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change. That robot should keep its day job. But the technology has come even further since then. When we did the book, we used models we most probably don't use anymore. So when we have to listen to a sound we created a couple of years ago, we really feel bad. We want to remake the voice. And that's the case. when we could reach out to a production company and just say, can we please do it again?

17:37Just replace the vocal track. We would do it for free. We just want it to be better on the current level of quality. Coming up, the Masters of Scale team does a test drive with the latest version of Riz Feature. And so how pretty do you want me? More than normal? And we ponder the vast implications. That's after the break.

18:11Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

19:00And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

19:44So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. Okay, before we get even deeper into the world of Reed's vocal clone, it only seems fair to give it a name. Reed, you've referenced your digital twin. Is that how we should think about an AI-generated Reed voice, or would you want us to think about it differently? Digital twin's okay. It wasn't really the language I generated. That was the team doing it. It's kind of a little bit of an industry parlance that I think is a little strange. You know, it is good to have something that is both like read, but also read-ish because there's English.

20:31You know, read-ish. Ish is kind of a suffix. People say, you know, do you think that this is a complete catastrophe? It's like, well, ish. Love it. Read-ish it is. Now, to better ponder what we're truly getting into, producers Yves Tro, Juliette Luini, and Alex Morris logged into our Respeacher account and got to work. Okay, I am rolling again. So we're making these recordings, and then we're going to feed them into Respeacher. Okay. It's kind of nerve-wracking. I know. I'm like sweating like Reed probably does in his recording sessions. Alex, are you ready to play Reid Hoffman? I'm ready. Our producers tried out what is somewhat awkwardly called the speech-to-speech process, hearing how realistic Reid-ish sounds filtered through each of their voices.

21:26I'm Reid Hoffman is a strange thing to say because I'm not Reid Hoffman, but this is the technology we're thinking of using, so I'm going to go for it. I'm Reid Hoffman. Co-founder of LinkedIn. Partner at Greylock. and your host. And I believe and I believe and I believe

21:46We've uploaded our audio files, all three examples. Now tell me where we're at. Now it is converting our original audio file into Reid Hoffman. And it'll take like five minutes, hopefully. That's like kind of surprising to me, like five minutes. I genuinely thought it was going to be something where it's like 24 hours and then they send you some sort of a file. I am shocked. That's pretty close to real time. Yeah, it's about the amount of time you would need to upload a big audio file and convert it to any other format. It's ready. Do you want to just play it? Let's do it. I'm so excited to hear how it picks up Alex's accent.

22:34I'm Reid Hoffman. co-founder of linkedin partner at graylock and your host and i believe you need to amplify the unique stories of your community and your customers doing so will build a foundation of trust loyalty and enduring impact wow okay i my first thought is that hearing reed's voice but with my specific accent it sounded to me like he was like a london gangster it was like a guy richie film i was like he he was like one of the cray twins i'm honestly so impressed at how i'm literally like that was reed hoffman with a british accent if he was making fun of me he would do that obviously for an american to do a british accent is a very safe voice that you can do, right?

23:31In terms of cultural appropriation. We're going to have to start having conversations about where's the line? What can you do? And I don't know, like what feels insensitive? Yeah, that's a good point. It brings up these issues of authenticity. You can pretend to be another nationality, another gender that you are not. And it's so easy. As a media producer, or I'm just immediately so excited about the technology that I need someone to prompt the discussion of the dangers of it like that, like that question of authenticity and identity, then I think, oh, right, yes, that's right. This could be used for other things that are not so great.

24:13But because we're so focused on what we're aiming to use it for, I think it just makes me pretty giddy. Okay, let's hear yours. I'm Reid Hoffman. co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe you need to amplify the unique voices of your community and your customers. Doing so will build a foundation of trust, loyalty, and enduring impact.

24:43Okay, we are all holding back explosive laughter right now. That was unpleasant to listen to. I wouldn't say it was unpleasant to listen to. It just didn't sound like Reed, but he was like, okay, well, here I go, I guess. I know. No pressure. Okay. I'm Reed. It is rude to say. But it also did sound like my voice had an undertone of fear in it, which I don't know if that comes across day to day, but for some reason. You're rethinking everything. You're thinking, do I sound like a fearful woodland creature in my everyday conversation? No, I don't think you do. Yeah, I mean, that's what's nuts is I think I thought this was going to feel like we're doing an impression of Reid Hoffman, but it actually felt like Reid was doing a mean impression of us.

25:39Yeah, that's so accurate. Should we hear the other one? I'm Reid Hoffman. Co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe you need to amplify the unique stories of your community and your customers. Doing so will build a foundation of trust, loyalty, and enduring impact. Wow. I can tell that it's me because I know how I say things and also my cadence. But I don't know. What did you guys say? I want to play with the pitch and see if I can move the pitch down because I think you Eve did a very good Reid Hoffman actually. So I clicked a plug in and it says regeneration settings, pitch shift, and it has a scale from negative 12 all the way to positive 12.

26:31And we can play around with this scale to change the pitch. If we did like a negative six, I feel like it would be really good. I feel like that's going to sound like spot on, actually. So maybe we should try that now. Yeah, let's do it. I'm Reid Hoffman. Co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe you need to amplify the unique stories of your community and your customers. Doing so will build a foundation of trust, loyalty, and enduring impact. That's good. That was really good. I feel like you get the sort of downward ending of sentences like Reed does. And that's where it really sounded like him.

27:13That to me was pretty spot on. I think that's the best one so far for sure. Picture a vast library with sections for every genre you can imagine. You can find escapism in the romance and sci-fi sections, points of reflection in memoir and poetry. I, to be quite honest, still don't know how I feel about it. I think we were in a really interesting position because, you know, we're working with one of the pioneers of AI technology. It means we're encouraged more than I think most places to kind of experiment with it. Even when you're experimenting, I think it still feels like that there's stakes there.

27:52And we wanted to make sure that we were always fully conscious of what we were doing and what we were creating. One of the ways that we're putting guardrails on the use of the technology is that the script is still written by writers, researched by researchers, vetted by Reed, and signed off on editorially. And we're really putting a lot of importance on that and feeling that that's a big part of the integrity that gives us license to use re-speecher because we are really thinking of it as a technical production tool rather than displacing any intellectual or creative labor. I think that's a great point.

28:43And I think that is a really important line to draw. Staff writer Dan Nealon chimes in on that front.

29:16directly tied to read. Really making sure the audience understands that is a huge thing for me in particular as a creative and as a writer. I want people to know we're not handing over the keys to the car. We're just like, I can't extend this metaphor anymore, changing the paint job. Associate producer Masha Makotunina was also concerned about ethics. Even in the English language, there is a phrase, you've got my word. Maybe it was read, maybe it was approved by you, but not technically said by you. And suddenly, like, it's a Pandora box. But my relationship with this technology also was affected when I heard the way Reid talks about it.