Samsung wants to help by letting you create a replica of your voice using artificial intelligence so that you can answer your phone even when you can’t.
The feature, called “Custom Voice Creator,” is only available in Korean and is part of Samsung’s Bixby Text Call service, which lets you answer a call by typing a text message instead. Samsung plans to release the voice creator tool in English later this year, a Samsung spokesperson said to CNET via email.
The announcement comes after Google used Google Assistant to automate certain parts of the phone-calling experience.
Samsung’s new feature is not an AI clone that answers calls entirely on your behalf. Instead, Bixby Text Call lets you type a text message to answer a phone call at times when it may not be appropriate to do so verbally. Bixby then converts your typed text to audio for the recipient.
Bixby Text Call transcribes verbal phone calls into a back-and-forth text chat in real time and reads aloud written messages from the sender in a generic AI voice. It is now available in English, Samsung just announced, and combined with the Custom Voice Creator, users can now have their voice clone replace the generic one.
In other words, somebody could theoretically have an entire, overly complicated call without actually picking up the phone.
When the Bixby Custom Voice Creator’s AI-generated voice answers a phone call, it will let the caller know that Bixby is answering the call rather than the user, Samsung said.
When asked whether Samsung has safeguards in place to prevent someone else from creating a copy of your voice through a recording, Samsung said users will need to read specific sentences to generate the custom voice.
“Using the new Bixby Custom Voice Creator users can record different sentences for Bixby to analyze and create an AI-generated copy of their voice and tone,” Samsung explains.
Bixby’s text-to-speech transcription process takes place on the device itself rather than in the cloud, Samsung said when announcing Bixby Text Call last year. Audio is also deleted right after the recognition process takes place, according to the company.
Bixby text call is available on the Galaxy S23, S23+, S23 Ultra, Z Fold 4, and Z Flip 4, with One UI 5.1 or above for English. The voice-creator feature works on the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra.
