Voice Cloning

What does it mean in everyday language?

A system learns features of a voice from examples and uses them to produce speech the person may never have recorded.

An example

Hypothetical example: with a narrator's permission, a publisher uses a modeled version of that narrator's voice to produce an updated introduction.

A more precise definition

Voice cloning is the synthesis or conversion of speech to resemble an identifiable target speaker. Its quality depends on the system, reference recordings, language, and conditions in which the output is heard.

Key features

• Targets characteristics of a particular voice
• Can produce new spoken material
• Requires a distinction between vocal resemblance and a genuine recording

Where the definition stops

A generic synthetic voice is not necessarily a clone of an individual. A convincing resemblance does not prove that the person spoke, approved, or even knew about the words.

How it relates to synthetic imprinting

Recognizable speech is one form of synthetic exposure. Researchers can investigate whether voice familiarity changes credibility or later source judgments.

Research context

Jia and colleagues demonstrated a system that synthesizes speech in voices learned from reference audio. A technical demonstration of resemblance does not establish psychological effects or consent to a particular use.

Related terms

• Deepfake Emerging Concept
• Synthetic Media Emerging Concept
• Source Monitoring Established Concept

Sources and further reading

1. Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis — Ye Jia, Yu Zhang, Ron J. Weiss, Quan Wang, Jonathan Shen, Fei Ren, Zhifeng Chen, Patrick Nguyen, Ruoming Pang, Ignacio Lopez Moreno, Yonghui Wu (2018). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31.

Cite this definition

What the status means

First published

2026-09-24

Updated

2026-09-24

Version

1.0

Prepared by

SyntheticImprinting.com Editorial Project

Review status

External expert review pending

Page address

https://syntheticimprinting.com/terms/voice-cloning/

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