Son Uses Artificial Intelligence to Recreate Late Father’s Voice, Resulting in Chills All Over His Body, as a Christmas Gift

AI experts are always quick to talk about the dangers of generative AI—from how it could eventually replace human jobs, to how it could become sentient and develop a mind of its own. But it’s important to remember that generative AI can also be incredibly useful, and when used correctly, can help people in a way that no other technology has been able to before.

So yes, it’s true that AI can be useful as it can help us streamline and automate tedious tasks that once took hours to complete. What if artificial intelligence could be used to recreate the voice of a dead loved one? That’s exactly what a man from St. Louis, Missouri, US did when he created his late father’s voice to surprise his mother this Christmas, as reported by Good Morning America.

Philip Willett shared parts of the same in a TikTok video after his wife suggested he was already using AI for his client work. “At first I thought I really don’t want to wade into it. I thought it was kind of weird, Willett said on Good Morning America.

Eventually, though, he convinced himself to search online to see if others were looking for a similar result. He says he found “a whole community” of individuals in the same boat. Next, he turned to ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech software to try to recreate the voice of his late father, John Willett.

“The actual first words I put into the show were, ‘Hey, baby.’ And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard my late father say that in my life, so that was the first thing I said. put it in,” Willett said.

Later, “When the show said it in his voice … I got chills all over my body,” Willett added. “At the time, I thought, I’m going to do this no matter what.” In the end, he ended up putting together a video with photos and his father’s synthetically generated voice for his mother before Christmas.