Forbes.com

Virtual Voices Of The Stars

by Arik Hesseldahl, 08.14.02, 10:00 AM ET

NEW YORK - If a few years from now, John Wayne seems to make a comeback to the screen or Tom Cruise suddenly seems fluent in Spanish and Italian, both will no doubt be an illusion. But at least it will be an interesting illusion, and one concocted by Elio Zarmati.

Zarmati is the chief executive of VoxWorks, a Los Angeles-based startup developing a technology that allows anyone to sound like anyone else. It's a computer software package called ReelVoice--and Zarmati says Hollywood has needed something like it for years.

Until a few years ago, Zarmati owned Gelula & Co., a private firm that specialized in dubbing the spoken dialogue of films made in the U.S. so they could be released in overseas markets on DVD. If you've watched a DVD with the dialogue track in a language other than English, you may have heard an actor hired by Gelula. "The average film needs to be dubbed into 20 to 28 languages for DVD release in six regions," Zarmati says. "When I owned it, our firm did 34 languages."

But finding a voice actor with both the language skills and a voice that resembles that of the original actor is a tricky problem--and an expensive one at that. Imagine trying to cast the voices for Lilo and Stitch in German or Jar-Jar Binks from the recent Star Wars movies in Chinese--and you get the idea.

The idea behind ReelVoice, Zarmati says, is to let any voice actor sound like the original actor, regardless of language. The process involves first recording a 20-minute to 40-minute sample of the original actor's voice. Then an actor who speaks the relevant language records their dialogue. The software can then match the original voice sample to the new dialogue and produce an audio track that sounds just like the original actor.

And Zarmati sees uses for the software beyond just movies. Imagine getting a phone call from Madonna reminding you that she's doing a concert in your city soon, or from Shaquille O'Neal that the Lakers are playing the Bulls this week. Once they've recorded an original voice sample, neither Madonna nor Shaq needs to set foot in a studio to record those messages.

And actors with profitable voices could digitize their voices and put them to work until long after their pipes give out, as long as they're in demand. James Earl Jones, longtime pitchman for Verizon, whose voice still graces its recorded phone messages, comes to mind.

The possibility also exists to give new voices to celebrities long dead. There's no reason, Zarmati says, that a sample of John Wayne, Lucille Ball or Jackie Gleason can't be taken from existing recordings. New actors could record clever commercials for radio and TV and sound just like the originals.

Zarmati's goal is to have ReelVoice on the market within nine months, and he hopes to unveil it at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2003. He's currently in negotiation for backing from film studios--he wouldn't say which ones--and seeking venture-capital backing.