ElevenLabs just got nuked by open source

Quinn just released Quen 3 TTS and uh 11 Labs has something to be worried about. Um I already talked about last year how somebody cloned my voice and used it in tutorial video series and it sounded pretty good. That was using 11 Labs last year and they're a little bit better now. And uh it's it's very easy to take someone's audio like you could just take the audio off of this video, upload it to 11 Labs and clone my voice. A lot of these cloud services are supposed to have safeguards against cloning other people's voices, but uh you know those work better and worse. But that's besides the point now because there is an open-source Quinn which is made by Alibaba cloud in China. Uh they have released this TTS series of models that you can download and run on almost any kind of system. I can run it on a Raspberry Pi with an external GPU. I can run it on my Mac. I could even run it on my phone if I wanted to. And uh you just take a recording of someone and you put a transcript in, put those together, and a couple minutes later you can clone someone's voice and make them say anything. This is just using the demo that's hosted on Hugging Face. So, this is running on their servers, but uh it's not that hard to run this on your own. And I'm sure that there's going to be software tools like a Mac OS app or Windows app that you could just download and do this yourself. But all I did was I typed in these words here. I read them into my computer and recorded this little clip. It's a little scary how easy it is to clone anyone's voice, even my own. My voice is my passport. Verify me. And uh you put in um something that you want it to say right here. And you can let it detect your uh language. And there's a couple model sizes, so you could even run this on a smaller computer. Then uh I mean, both of these run on a lot of modern systems. And you click this button, and after a minute or so, it will spit out something like this. Cloning someone's voice used to take at least a little effort. Now it's even easier and some people can do it free and offline at home. So obviously that's not the same intonation that I have. My vocal range is a lot different and there's little quirks to the way that a real human being talks. And uh the problem is that for little short snippets that doesn't really matter. It it's it's good enough with this free model that anybody can run. It's good enough that it can fool you if it's a short phrase. And it's good enough that it will fool a lot of people if they're not familiar with the person. So, you know, if you've never seen one of my videos before and this is the first video you're watching, if I just used this tool and had the, you know, if if I generated different ways and I tweaked it a little bit, I could generate the audio for an entire video and you probably wouldn't notice. That doesn't make me too happy. [laughter] Honestly, as somebody whose voice is part of their online presence, that is something that generates revenue for me. The ability to just clone my voice and slap it on anything doesn't get me that excited. Uh because so far I have never used except for in demonstrating this technology. I've never used a cloned voice in any footage even for a little pickup or a little oneliner or anything like that. And I don't plan on ever doing that. But I've already seen other people use my voice and I didn't authorize it. And uh yeah, I'm I'm a little worried that uh this is it's getting easier and easier to do these things and we're going to see more AI slop that actually looks like it's realistic because now it's easier and quicker to generate people's voices to go behind it. And all you really need to do is rip off some of someone's video and boom, you have their

Here's the Qwen3-TTS Demo app I showed in the video: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS It's only a matter of time until there's an open UI for it that beats Eleven Labs—all for free. Read about the time someone cloned my voice for a video training series, unauthorized: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/elecrow-responded-apologized-ai-voice-cloning/ Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/geerlingguy Sponsor me on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/geerlingguy Merch: https://www.redshirtjeff.com 2nd Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GeerlingEngineering 3rd Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Level2Jeff