Hello, humans! As we are on the brink of the Biggest Era, Humans.ai is offering an exclusive sneak peek at AI Voices, one of the six products that the Web 3.0 company is going to release in the following period.
Humans.ai is taking the abstract concept of a non-fungible token (NFT) and is applying its AI technology twist to create voice NFTs, a new type of intelligent collectable that encapsulates a voice inside the NFT. With this new take on this technology, Humans.ai is bringing the worlds of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology together to reimagine the concept of art and how we interact with it.
Works of art communicate on a deep and intimate level with humans. From the masterful brushstrokes of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Botticelli, to the lifelike marble sculptures of Michelangelo, Rodin and Donatello, artworks, regardless of their medium, seem to transcend speech, utterly destroying language barriers by resonating directly with the soul of their beholder.
Art is much more than our imagination with a voice, it is a direct reflection of humans and our place in the world, perfectly mirroring our evolution since the dawn of civilization. The digital age is no exception. In fact, it marks the beginning of a more inclusive approach to art, one in which the materialization of an idea to contend is facilitated by technology, which acts as the new instrument of creation.
Humans.ai has made it its mission to pave the way to a new type of art backed by artificial intelligence. Our vision is moulded by an ethical approach towards artificial intelligence, one in which every human can get directly involved with the creation, management and supervision of the AI of the future. We believe that the artworks of the future shouldn’t be perceived as a static asset, just a beautiful display piece that you can hang on your wall and enjoy. What if we can make our art work for us? What if our art was intelligent?
These are some of the questions answered by Humans.ai’s new voice NFTs.
Voice NFTs a dynamic asset class
Humans.ai is leveraging its AI technology to transform NFTs from a static collectable with limited functionality to a human-centric and dynamic asset class. The NFT phenomenon took the market by storm in recent years, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down soon. At their core, NFTs are still an abstract concept, usually represented by an identification number and a unique image, like the various AI-generated human heads that can be found in the Humans.ai NFT collection.
As most of you already know, NFTs are deeply rooted in a technology called blockchain, a type of distributed ledger technology that acts as the backbone of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and of course, $HEART. The bottom line is that technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it doesn’t have an insular existence. This type of thinking opens up a whole new window of opportunities to explore. Following this mindset, Humans.ai decided to spice things up by mixing its AI technology with blockchain to create voice NFTs, an intelligent and dynamic asset class that we hope will become a new standard in the smart collectable market.
As the name implies, AI Voices is a type of NFT that isn’t just a standard jpeg image but also has a voice encapsulated inside it. At the moment of writing, Humans.ai is working extensively on a library of 10 000 unique synthetic voices, each of them with different pitches, tonalities and ways of expressing themselves. Each voice will be encapsulated inside a voice NFT to produce a unique collectable that can be purchased and exchanged by users just like any other NFT.
A closer look at AI Voices and how they work
In the initial stages, we will focus on using synthetic voices to preserve the anonymity of the users. So, the library of 10 000 voices cannot be linked to any real-life individuals to avoid ownership leakages. This design choice also addresses the elephant in the room, people misusing the voices of real humans to propagate wrong messages, misinformation and hate speech. We are currently tinkering with our Proof of Human mechanism to help ensure that any AI technology developed within the Humans.ai ecosystem is kept ethical by real human validators.
Compared to other similar voice-based NFT projects on the market, where you have a talking picture that speaks one or two sentences and that’s it, Humans.ai wishes to expand the concept, giving it a wider range of possible applications by focusing on the transition from one modality to another, namely text to speech. As such, our voice NFTs will be able to take text input and use the voice encapsulated inside it to create an audio output. We manage to do this by translating the text and language to phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another word in a language. Based on these phonemes, the technology developed by Humans.ai performs the transition from text to audio.
Like traditional NFTs, every voice NFT will be unique due to a combination of frequencies, parameters and audio coefficients applied to each voice. This means that voice NFTs will be highly tradeable. If you happen to like a particular voice, you can purchase it or exchange it with its owner. This takes us to our next question:
Who is the target audience?
Our target audience isn’t limited just to crypto and tech people, on the contrary, we wish to include people that are not in the IT business, artists and everyone who wants to become a content creator. Since day one, our voice NFTs were designed to be available to everyone, regardless of their technical prowess.
Acquiring a voice NFT follows the same pattern as any other NFT, the difference and innovation stem from how you can use it. Through a streamlined UI, users only need to input a piece of text they want to transform into speech and our technology does all the heavy lifting.
The innovation behind the AI Voices
The beauty of voice NFTs stems from the fact that it manages to bridge the gap between two of the most innovative technologies from the market, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, to create a new type of asset that can be collected and utilized by everyone.
The voice component of the NFTs designed by Humans.ai isn’t just an audio file embedded inside the NFT or a certificate of ownership of a piece of audio that resides inside a blockchain. Humans.ai wanted to make its voice NFTs a dynamic asset class that can be used by its users in many ways within our ecosystem. So, by inserting a text input, users can give a heartbeat to the voice inside the NFT which will transform the text input into speech.
Without a doubt, the ability to transform any text input into speech raises a series of ethical concerns regarding how this technology can be misused. To address these pressing issues, Humans.ai has created its Proof of Human mechanism, which ensures that AI is maintained ethical and under close observation of human validators. In the case of voice NFTs, Proof of Human will ensure that real humans will decide if the voice is used in an ethical fashion and reject any requests to use the voice NFT as a vehicle to propagate obscene content, hate speech, or anything politically incorrect.
A collectable that can be put to work to run NFTs like companies
A voice box for Metaverse avatars
Once the development lifecycle of the Humans.ai voice NFTs reaches their maturity, users will be able to use their collectables in a wide range of applications beyond simply generating speech from text. Probably one of the most popular use cases will be related to the new Metaverse and how users will interact with each other in this expansive virtual reality. In the Metaverse, people will create a digital avatar and use it as an extension of themselves to buy digital property, attend concerts, play games and interact with other people. We intend to enable Metaverse users to give a voice to their digital avatar with our voice NFTs. So, besides being a cool collectable that you can trade on the Metaverse, you will also be able to use it to further customize and give a voice to your avatar.
Advertising made simple
With the voice NFTs developed by Humans.ai, every small business owner will have access to a streamlined and cost-efficient way of advertising their product or business. With our voice NFTs, you no longer need to rely on expensive media companies that charge a significant amount of money for a few seconds of video. You can take on the role of both producer and director and use the voice NFT to add a narration to a video in which you can present and explain your idea or product.
Democratizing content creation
Humans.ai is working on its trademark Humans studio, an ecosystem in which people will be able to piece together multiple AI components in a seamless way to create their unique piece of synthetic media. One of these components will be the voice NFTs which users will be able to combine with a virtual avatar, a talking head, for example, and make it communicate through the voice encapsulated inside the NFT. In the near future, users will be able to use the technology developed by Humans.ai to have the digital avatar speak in multiple languages with different voices. Users will not be limited only to the synthetic voice from the first iteration of voice NFTs but will be able to use their own voice and customize it according to their preferences.
Conclusion
In the first stage of development, which just started with the launch of the Biggest Era, Humans.ai will focus mainly on voices, hence the idea of encapsulating a voice inside an NFT. But we are certainly don’t intend to stop at voices, far from it. AI Voices is just the first step towards developing our AI NFTs, a multimodal NFT that can encapsulate every aspect of a human’s digital DNA.
