Yes! There a few options. First, we do have a limited number of donor voices available. These are voices recorded by people who generously agreed to allow any of our clients to use them. Currently, there is no charge for downloading a donor voice, although we may find it necessary to add a fee in the future. There is currently a limited number available on the website, but we do have others we haven’t posted; if you don’t find one on the website that matches you in gender, age, and dialect, contact us at staff@modeltalker.org, and we may have a more appropriate one in our database.
Second, if you have a close relative who sounds much like you, they might be willing to act as your Proxy and donate their voice for your use. To get started with this option, your relative needs to register as a “Proxy Voice Banker” and list you in the box labeled “Recipient”. You also need to register your own account, as a “Voice Banker or Recipient.” Then your relative can get started with the recording process (by selecting “Recording” > “Online Setup and Training” from our home page). Once your relative has finished recording their voice under their own account, we will put the completed voice under your account for downloading.
Third, if you do not have a close relative who is willing to donate his/her voice, we may still be able to help using a new process that we are developing. Using this process, we can take the voice of any donor who is a fairly good match to you in terms of gender, voice pitch, and dialect. Someone like a friend or neighbor who grew up or has lived near you for most of his or her life would be a great candidate for this. We will have the voice donor record the list of sentences and will sample as much of your own speech range as possible to modify the donor’s recordings to sound more like you. If you are interested in trying this very experimental approach, please contact us at staff@modeltalker.org.
Finally, there is the option of building a voice from recordings you’ve made in the past. This is something we usually don’t do, as such recordings usually do not have audio quality sufficient for building a synthetic voice, among other problems. But if you have a large amount of high-quality and accurately transcribed pre-recorded speech, you can contact us to discuss the possibility.