OpenAI Voice Mode CANCELLED plus Microsoft's new desktop assistant. 

It is CLEARLY two different voices. And even if someone were to claim they sound somewhat similar, so what? Does that diva own the rights to all female voices that might resemble hers? Completely ridiculous.

I think what should happen is the actress that voiced Sky should sue S.J. for loss of income for claiming her (voice actress) voice was S.J.s since she will now lose the income from it.

"Do they sound the same?" No, absolutely not.

How DARE two humans sound similar!?! Clearly famous people own ALL the mouth noises!

The other poor voice actress can no longer work for a living because Scarlett thinks she's such a diva.

They definitely sound like different people. They tried to make it a comforting voice, similar to the movie "her", but the voice is not the same.

So if a movie studio asks an actress to play a role because she is very similar to the character they imagined, but the studio is turned down, would that actress then be able to sue if the studio went and found someone else who is very similar to the character they imagined for the part?

I think it’s a real stretch to say that the ‘Sky’ voice sounds like Scarlet Johannsen. The voice actress they used is the hurt party here!

You paid another person who has a vaguely similar voice to me and used it in a product.... How dare you not pay ME instead!! 🤦‍♂️ What's wrong with her wtf.

"the machine sounds like me" is such a 1st world problem it might actually be the very first 0th world problem ever...

Scarjo needs to chill. She turned it down, they found a voice actor to give them what they were looking for.

I don't think the voices are similar, but it seems that Johansson tries to stretch the meaning of similar to be able to attract public attention to the things she mentioned in the last paragraph.

News flash Scarlett, it's not all about you. Get over yourself.

Sky does not sound exactly like Scarlett. It sounds like a friendly female. I'm a fan of Scarlett and would have noticed.

Well, if she passed up on it and the new voice sounds like her that's her own problem. If it isn't exactly the same then all she gets is nothing. If we can't use voices that sound similar to someone then we can't use voices at all.

In the first place Open ai didn't want Scarlette's voice, they wanted Her's voice. If Scarlett was no ready to do the job, I think anyone else could, right?

When watching the OAI demo, "her" came to mind, not because of the voice, but because of the friendly, flirtatious interaction. OAI should have made its case and proved, by introducing the actual voice actor, it was not a duplicate.

🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷👏🏻, The voice named Sky was an amazing choice for voice, hands down the best voice openAI had for us to use. I think of ourselves as users, we have a great loss as users since the voice Sky just is no longer an option.

Sounds almost as if everyone expects OpenAI to not go forward with any AI voice. This is how business goes... If you don't want to do the job, someone else will.

Sky didn't sound like Scarlett Johanson, but more like RASHIDA JONES

What makes this issue ridiculously stupid and moot is that users will just use whatever voice model they wish, and techologies like Eleven Labs will allow anyone to replicate any voice they want or creat custom ones wholesale.

This title is referring to the already well known fact that Scarlet Johannsen's voice isn't going to be included in the voice options for the entire voice mode... "OpenAI Voice Mode CANCELLED" is clickbait and exaggeration of the situation. I really like a lot of your content, and it's your right to post what you want on your channel, but I've noticed more of your content is becoming either SHOCKING clickbait or intentionally vague/deceptive clickbait like this. I unsub from channels like this because I don't want a ton of shallow and redundant content in my sub box. I understand how it can be easy to write off all comments like this as "haters", but it's just honest feedback from someone in your audience who for the most part liked your work.

This SJ voice thing is so dumb.

They shoulda used Wes' voice. Silky smoooooove 😎

Apparently Sam loves Her. The best parts of the movie was from Allan Waats. My hero. Sam’s loves HER so much that he is willing to make Lucy come alive. It shall happen.

The AI voice sounds more like Ann Hathaway than Scarlett Johansson.

Doesn’t sound like her to me… more “regular” to me

i'm a navy sonar tech subs vet. the movie voice is a hard no. The interview voice is similar but wrong octave. any musician, singer, audio expert can pick it out easily.

They found a voice that sounded like the AI in a movie. Why isn't the movie company complaining about their IP?

She must think she's so special. The voice doesn't even sound exactly like her. She just wants to start a fight out of arrogance. People could have made RVC models that sound exactly like her for a long time now, so paranoia isn't gonna solve anything for her. Just as few people care about her now as they did before voice cloning was a thing. If Open AI used her voice to train the AI, it would sound exactly like her. She's gonna make a fool out herself if she tries to sue Open AI. Petty feelings aren't a solid basis for lawsuits.

Juniper is my favorite voice in Voice Mode. Apparently the voice called “Sky” is now identical to “Juniper”. Scarlett Johansson is clearly abusing her celebrity here.

So, as I thought, they didn’t cancel the voice mode at all, they just put one of the voices on hold.

personally. I didn't think of Scarlett at all when I watched the demo.

similar but I didn't think identical

This is nonsense…I could make the argument that Wes (the creator of this video) sound a lot like the Cove voice…people sound alike at time. And no I don’t mean the cove demo voice, I mean the voice in a actual chat. it sounds much different when actually using it in a chat then the demo they give

I can see the point from both sides. I think I’m more in the side of if they actually used a voice actress they sounds similar that should be fine.

I don't think its the same voice. Its not airy enough.

Those recent developments seem like a move by both OpenAI and Scarlett's team to negotiate a better price for her voice.

All the other voices suck.

Voices can be plotted on a graph and compared like finger prints. You have to make your case using math not emotions in the court room.

I'm looking forward to using an AI that sounds like Majel Barrett as the computer in Star Trek.

The best case that SJ can make is that Sky voice sounds "vaguely similar" to her performance in Her. Nothing else. No case here, just drama.

To me, this would be rather similar to a movie producer wanting to use an AI clone of Robin William's likeness. For this example, let's assume they wanted ONLY the likeness and not the voice pattern. Let's say the William's estate declined. So, the producer finds an actor with a striking visual similarity to Robin Williams. That doesn't seem illegal or even shady.

It was not her voice. Sam could easily prove who was actually sampled, and I think he should have done it.

Sam was not talking about the voice. The Sky voice was released months before the tweet. When Johanson calls "Sky" the "newest system", she's just wrong. It's one of several voice modules that has been available via the Open AI app for several months. That voice was used during the GPT-4o demo (along with several other voices), but it was not new. The live interactivity of the demo is what Sam was talking about when he tweeted "her", as that demo was less than a week old then.

I wonder about the NPU. Will it perform well without high-speed memory? Will it be generalized enough to run whatever new llm architectures come out in the following years? Will it be widely available?

They went for the best voice closer to SJ. But is not her.

Great work by the actress hired to voice Sky! 😊

they dont sound the same at all to the trained (or untrained) ear. what a ridiculous mass psychosis.

They are not the same voice

Please can someone help me... I can't find an answer anywhere... I'm in the UK using android chatgpt 4o and have a premium account. I can't seem to real-timeme conversion or real-time visual input like in the recent demos. Is this ability only available to some? All I can do is voice input, and it reads back the response. This isn't the same as the demos. It's still really just a text conversion. Thank you in advance. It's driving me nuts trying to find an answer to this!

I checked with Microsoft CoPilot and the Sky voice existed before Scarlett ever made her statement but OpenAI decided to pause the voice due to the consternation it had caused. Regardless of privacy, if subpoenaed, the relevant voice actor would be required to attend court. Guess what I'd finally say is that there must be more than one person in the world that sounds like Scarlett besides herself and that if she is serious, take it to court and let the voice actor that OpenAI asserts provided her voice come forward on the witness stand.

SJ was offered the role and turned it down. What did she think they would do? If Julia Robert’s turns down a role Sandra Bullock is allowed to take it.

The issue is that everything OAI says could be true, and it would still be considered impersonation of likeness legally because of the circumstances of how things went down. If they hadn't reached out to ScarJo first and if they hadn't tweeted 'her,' this wouldn't be happening.

Different voices, I can clearly hear a raspy tone, probably from her smoking past. Another question: Voices change with age and other factors, how can anybody, with these conditions, claim that's a copycat? I'm pretty sure that a voice security algorithm can discern both voices easily.

I can kind of see why people think the voices sound similar, but having heard Johanson’s voice a few times now, I wouldn’t recognize Sky as her voice outside of a direct comparison. I also haven’t watched Her, yet, though.

Great coverage of this issue. Thank you.

My reaction to the demo was definitley wait, did they get SJ to voice this and if so why no mention? It's literally uncanny in the uncanny valley sense that it's close enough for doubt. An A/B comparison of clips isn't how we evaluate voices in real life, you could do that with your closest friends recorded in different contexts at different ages and hear differences. In any case they obviously intended to borrow the affect of her voice as used in that movie, for publicity if not to actually go ahead and use as a live product. Which is funny because as much as i can enjoy the qualities of her vouce i thiught it was incongruous as an AI voice in the context of the movie.

They are different, but there are specific similarities that I, and at least everyone I've shown the voice model to, has had Scarlett Johansson as the first person we immediately think of it sounding like. They both have a very characteristic vocal fry near the ends of sentences and in the lower register and their specific timbres are very similar. I would also say, the fact that they took Sky down says a lot, when pressured to explain what exactly the voice model was trained on to sound like that. Sky was, by far, my favorite voice on there, so I'm bummed out, but if OpenAI approached you to use your voice for a chat model, you said no, and suddenly you hear a 97% similar voice used anyway, you might be annoyed too. Still, I was hoping to have SJ whispering sweet nothings in my ear all day, so this is a sad day indeed.

The Microsoft game voice there sounds more like bagley the AI "watchdogs legion" in my opinion, so are they going to be on them too?

Originality has never existed and we're only now starting to see how true that is.

When Apple had the same problem with the Beatles, they renamed their alert sound Sosueme.

Definitely sounds like a knock-on effect from the power of suggestion. Her friends & family told her that this AI voice sounds like her, she listened to it with that in mind, and because we artists aren't the best at emotional regulation, her brain ran away with that narrative, ironically, harming another actress in the process (potentially, depending on the contract). To me, I didn't even think they sounded remotely similar until someone pointed it out, and even then, the best I can give it is they share a similar vibe. They're within the same type, maybe? But Sky isn't the only voice available is the thing, and they're only going to add more voices over time. You need a lot of different voices to cover the vast range of tones that people may desire from a personal assistant, so it's only natural that a voice in Scarlett's range was going to be sampled at some point. But like I said, the power of suggestion is strong, especially when it pairs with a pre-existing bias. There's a lot of resistance against AI right now, so when people see the headline "ChatGPT stole celebrity's voice" people are naturally going to pounce on that without probing, and when others present them with the facts as we know them, they will sink deeper into emotional reasoning to justify their initial presumption, which can be seen with statements like "It's so obvious, they even asked her again right before announcement" as if that's some smoking gun, rather than a vague event we don't have all the details for. But yeah, I don't really blame people for acting irrationally while everything is emotionally charged, and I think it's important to discuss why people tend to act this way, but it's also frustrating when, from my perspective, this is such a nothing burger in the scheme of all the Open AI drama.

The ai voice sounds like a mix between a few, but its DEFINITELY not the same. Maybe like Scarlett Johanson and Jennifer Lawrence merged together. 😂

Listen to the voice back to back with Scarlett then go listen to Rashida Jones and tell me which one sounds closer

Subscribed... by the way, I want OpenAI to hire Wes for his voice. :)

they have removed the SKY voice and replaced it with the Juniper voice. If you go to the voice settings the Sky Demo is still there but if you choose it it goes right back to Juniper

Similar, not the same

Sam wanted a voice like Scarletts. He asked her. She says no. He finds a similar voice. Shocking

3:49 - To me it doesn't sound like Scarlett johanson's voice, not at all, maybe they are kinda similar but not identical

Proper attribution (even when a Product or work is free/ non commercial) and clear rules when it comes to IP rights is what we really need.

If I get a professional voice impressionist and and contract them to do a ScarJo voice, there's nothing they can do to legally stop me.

I have never felt such Animosity towards something or anything before i was very excited for this feature

Yes, it’s a different voice. It’s actually Juniper. If you going to settings, the sample for Sky is still the old voice, which is clearly meant to sound like Johannsen regardless of who the actual voice actor was. Now if you choose Sky you will get Juniper instead.

Hey WES, is there a way for me to use your voice for my AI assistance? I love your voice and want it as my personal AI.

When letting Sky speak in Dutch she sounds exactly like Eva Jinek including the accent. Eva Jinek is a Dutch talkshow host with American roots.

💥 Complete different voices ! And I watched the movie several times. 🎉❤

Stop sam altman didnt do anything the voices dont even sound the same to begin with 🙄🙄🙄

Doesn't sound anything alike.. I can still use her on my app. She's been my default all along

I never made the connection between the voices, and how when paying close attention to it, they clearly don't sound at all like the same person to me.

The voices don't seem that similar to me: a standard unaccented (for the US) youngish female voice.

I’m joining this discussion a bit late, but anyway: Basically, I wonder what the situation is with voice actors? Here in Germany, it’s an important and large market. For example, we booked the "Tom Selleck" voice (Norbert Langer) for an advertisement - his voice is different, if not better than Tom Selleck’s original voice, yet it is associated with the actor. This was and is consciously used, and Norbert Langer was often booked in commercials or documentaries because of his distinctiveness and closeness to "Magnum". What if OpenAI had booked the voice actors from each country - in this case, Luise Helm (German voice actress for SJ, Lauren Ambrose, Megan Fox, etc.)? Just a thought...

The director of 'Her' should've bought ScarJo voice himself. If only he knew

Why would they remove the voice if everything was on the up and up? They would legally be in the right. Seems to me that there may have been something in the process to get the voice closer to Scarlett's, even if they did use another person. After all, that is not really the voice actor's voice. It's a simulation of that actor's voice, which is further modified after the fact. I mean, they don't have her voice recorded for every potential response, do they? That requires some audio modification. Maybe while they were at it, they said, let's tweak it just a bit closer to Scarlett. It does sound like her. It has the same grammatical pauses she uses, and that same quasi-raspy sound that Scarlett has in her voice when she finishes a sentence.

I feel sorry for the actress voicing Sky. I'm sorry SJo, but you can't create exclusive copyright for the voice qualities of Sexy and Husky. It's obvious that SJo's voice had certain qualities that they wanted to capture with Sky but that doesn't make those qualities unique. This is literally how every actor is chosen for every role: according to some set of characteristics that fulfill the producer or director's vision. IMO Sky shares certain basic qualities with SJo's voice but it doesn't sound like an imitation or even that similar. Given that they already had an actress who did a wonderful job with Sky's voice, my guess at the reason Sam was still trying to get SJo 2 days before release was for the optics of the situation. He probably knew that this could become an issue (which it did) and also the announcement of "you can literally have SJo and the voice of Samantha" is a pretty neat drawcard if you could get it.

Someone could take a voice print of each, Sky and Scarlett and compare them. Similar voices should be an exact science, even for an AI.

Voices are similar . But not the same

the voice actress did a better impression of the her movie than the original

I think this is a blue/gold dress type of case. Where depending on your ears' sound interpretation, you will hear the same voice or totally different

So similar - no wonder she is taking action...its the underlying accent, timbre and huskiness SJ has that makes the Sky voice so like SJ

They sound so different; why claim it was her voice?

"pretty well" - "Pretty WEll" - PrettiWEll" very similar on the WELL. That is a cheek inflection (the corners of the lips.Happens over a lifetime). That is hard to accurately "generate" but not impossible. Highly possible the actors for the voices, knows that there is a higher likely hood that "If i sound like someone soft and popular, I will get paid for my voice to train it" (Ai). I for one LOVE Scarlett, LOVED HER the movie, and LOVE Ai. If i could emulate her and pay her directly for it, I WOULD!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sad I can not have what will be known as HER/SKY OG, but I hope she reopens her position on her voice. She is the perfect Ai Voice before real Ai voices. So, we would appreciate keeping it consistent. Even if it TERMINATORS us, I want it to be SCARLET. (fan boying but, i digress)

Why is everyone thinking "her" means Scarlett? It means operating system from the movie ffs! Not everything is about you, a shocking discovery indeed.

So, the media frenzy over Sky's voice being a Scarlett Johansson clone? Yeah, not buying it. Sure, it gives off some "Her" vibes, but let's be real-it's not a carbon copy of Scarlett's dulcet tones. Now we're stuck with just one female voice option, Juniper. Congrats to OpenAI for all that free high-profile media attention! Here's a wild idea: why not tweak Sky's pitch and modulation? Keep paying the voice actress what she deserves and let us enjoy that smooth, "reads good" feeling. Everybody wins! Just a thought. And to the voice actress behind Sky: thanks for making my mornings brighter with your coffee-compatible information breakdowns.☕🌇

They are similar voices but not identical 100%, I'm pretty sure there are ways to check similarity of voices in a more objective way than just hearing them back to back.

I'm sure there are forensic methods to clear OpenAI if it came to court, but they probably need time to prove it internally.

🤦‍♀️Seriously🤦‍♀️ Everyone knows why❕ Sam definitely has a huge crush on Scarlet 🤷‍♀️ Who doesn’t 😒

These are different voices but perhaps Scarlett thought they might have trained it on her voice. That's a reasonable assumption. Perhaps OpenAI will get permission to reveal the other actor's identity - I can only imagine it would be good for her to get the recognition.

They may have altered certain frequencies, but the prosody, cadence, inflections match. Whether S.J. has a right to that though is a really important question which we would all want answering if it was our likeness being duplicated at the risk of our earnings.

WTF, I was scared they canceled the complete voice mode, not just disabled that one voice!