This has been my dream since I was a teen - and now the tech is real. This is a fork of an existing speech-to-speech project by Huggingface, with a lot of additions to add the right chimes, the voice* and the overall wakeword architecture.
I’ve had it running for a day and … I like it. I’ll most likely wire up a version of this throughout the house so the whole family can live the trekkie life :)
*) Cloning Barrett’s voice … I know. It’s just little old me showing that we now have the tech, not some commercial venture. It’s done with the utmost of respect for her craft throughout all those years!
I think this topic is actually ripe for debate.
On one hand we know that Majel specifically recorded phonemes so her voice can be used for Star Trek purposes after her passing. While not a direct consent of “do whatever you want with my voice”, the intent of similar purposes as OP’s has been clearly present.
There’s also Paramount’s refusal to use her voice in new Trek, aside from a few snippets here and there (mostly Picard for the throwback value). Which kinda goes against the spirit of Trek.
On the other hand, the entire area of voice cloning is gray as fuck. It can very easily be used for nefarious purposes, yes - let that be corporate greed or fraud or propaganda. But if I make my own voice system, do I really hurt anyone by using their voice? I am not profiting off of it, I am not sharing the end result, it lives on my computer and that’s it.
But, let’s say I want to do the same. There’s this TV show from some 20 years ago called Eureka. In it is one of the earliest representations of a smart house with an AI governor, called SARAH. SARAH is voiced by one of the recurring cast members, in fact it’s an ongoing joke that the house is voiced by this guy “talking like a girl”, and that he’s trying to get Sarah Michelle Gellar to do the proper, final voice…
Now, the voice itself is pretty unique, but it isn’t the voice of the actor, it’s been heavily digitally edited. It’s also a pretty unique voice but not something 99.9% of people would recognise. I make my clone from my own BR disk collection, with a set of automated and AI tools to get the right audio, clean it up, split by talker, and process all 77 episodes, manually selecting the right samples, manually tagging and labelling each; and finally, fine-tuning my own model for my own use. It will never leave my home, I won’t sell or share it, and technically, with me owning the BR collection, this would fall under fair use.
Which is still quite different than, say, a corporate entity trying to sell more product by using your voice.