Wedding Business Solutions

Beth Z, your Nerdy Best Friend - Virtual Voice, is it the real you?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Beth Z, your Nerdy Best Friend - Virtual Voice, is it the real you?

Are you leveraging the power of AI to enhance your wedding business? Are you keeping up with the latest tools that could save you time and generate more personalized content? In this episode, I dive into a fascinating discussion with Beth Z about using AI voices and content creation tools. We explore the intricacies of voice cloning, ethical considerations, and practical applications that can revolutionize your workflow while staying authentic.

Listen to this new episode for innovative tips on using AI to efficiently create engaging content and stay ahead in the wedding business industry.

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 


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About Beth:  

Beth Ziesenis: Author. Speaker. Nerd.

Since her first Motorola RAZR flip phone, Beth has made a verb out of the word "nerd." She's here to help you filter through thousands of apps, gadgets, widgets and doodads to find the perfect free and bargain technology tools for work and home. Although the only real trophy she ever won was for making perfect French fries at McDonald's in high school, Beth Z has been featured on Best Speaker lists by several organizations who write best speaker lists. She has written a whole shelf of books on apps and has spoken to more than 100 thousand audience members just like you. And if you're puzzling over why she goes by "Beth Z"... it's because she only finds about three people a year who can pronounce her last name.

Website: https://yournerdybestfriend.com/


Contact Beth: 

Beth Ziesenis, CSP

Your Nerdy Best Friend                      

Phone: 619-231-9225

Website: https://yournerdybestfriend.com/


Alan hasn’t done a virtual master class since Covid, and since there’s been so much interest, he’s going to host only one before the end of 2024, to get you ready for engagement season, 2025 and beyond!

Only 16 Seats for this, so get your ticket(s) now! Click here

I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

Welcome to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. Today, I've invited a friend on to talk to us about a very cool and potentially dark area of new technology. It's my nerdy best friend, Beth Z. And she shared this technology with me recently, and now we want to share it with you. I'm your host, Alan Berg. Except I'm not. This is actually a clone of my voice, and technology is making it sound like me.


Welcome to the second introduction of this podcast. I'm Alan Berg, and the first part there kind of speaks for itself, but I wanted to invite my friend, my nerdy best friend, Beth Z on, to talk about AI and using AI voices because I saw her do some crazy stuff and I just had to have you on. So, Beth, how you doing to.


I'm great. And look, y'all, I'm real.


This is the real here. I'm going to pinch myself too. There we go. This is the real thing over here. So you are minority best friend. We'll talk more about what that means. We were just at a conference together, a national Speakers association conference, and you did this amazing thing on stage in 20 minutes, made an ebook using chat, GPT and canva and whatever. And I've now done some with a document.


I've done that with my content and all. Thank you so much for that. What I wanted to talk about here is in the hallway, or I think we're in the lobby or something, you pulled out your phone and you showed me a video of you saying something in another language, but you didn't say it in the other language. You said it in English, and then it looked like you speaking Spanish and then French and then Gen Z and all these other things over here. So I want to talk about the different ways that we can use AI voices. So what are you doing with them now? Yourself for your business?


First, let's all sit here and go. We have never seen anything like this for normal small businesses, medium businesses like this. The wedding industry has never had this capability, and it is so cheap. So what we're talking about here is amazing quality voice clones, phenomenally weird, yet almost convincing quality facial cloning. And it's happening with free and cheap software at the touch of our fingers everywhere we turn. So people are concerned about it, like, oh, it's going to the political world, it's going to completely take over all this misinformation. Well, those kind of things have been around a long time for some of the higher end pieces, but now everyday people can use these and using them for business. People are just wrapping their head around it existing.


And so I'm so glad you're bringing people into this to see how they can start thinking about how they can use it in the wedding business industry. The wedding industry business, right.


And use it legally, because that's the whole thing. The conference that we were at together the NSA thrive conference. I almost didn't go because I really didn't have any particular agenda. There wasn't anything on my list. Hey, I need this because I have so many friends like you I could just reach out to anytime. So, and I say, you know what, im going to go. Itll bring me into Albuquerque. I have some other friends that live local.


And then with what you did and with what Terry Brock and RK three did, just blew my mind and were using so many of these things because what I wanted to know was how can I use my content and use AI to do stuff with it as opposed to having AI create the content? Because lets face it, as speakers, we are the content creators. Ive written ten books. Im a content creator, so. And then I've had 230 something podcasts already. I don't know what number this one is. So I'm a content creator, so I resisted the idea of AI creating content. But what you showed me and what Terry and what Robert showed was how to use AI with your own content. So how do you see a business like somebody listening to this, that's a wedding venue, or they're in the event business, a photographer or a dj, whatever.


I using these virtual voices with their content.


I was. I ran a bed and breakfast for several years. When I had a practice husband, I accidentally married a cowboy. It happens, y'all, it happens. And I ran a bed and breakfast for several years. And we had a lot of weddings at this bed and breakfast. And bless the people who listen to your show, they are high maintenance. But one thing I know is that all of the people who deal with those weddings have tips and tricks and ideas and ways to help the bride and groom and the whole families and all the people involved.


And what I think some of the people who are on social media in creating these things they do is they offer those tips, they offer ideas, they talk about trends when they're sharing information to get their name out there for social media. So in this case, you're creating your own content, and you can immediately start repurposing that by just putting up one of your tips and cloning your voice and getting the pieces out very quickly. Cloning your voice right now. And I don't know if you could maybe send them to some of my experiments later with a link. Cloning your voice is so easy. Insanely easy. So we did that experiment at the beginning of this session where I spoke something. I asked social media.


No, I asked this tool, not social media. I asked this tool to clone your voice. And you gave me a sample of that. But I could have stolen it, but I didn't. You gave me a sample, I used it to train it and I had it say what I just said. And the weird thing is, is that whole process takes about three minutes from the time you get somebody's voice to the time you can spit out somebody's voice saying something they never said.


So this was, you read the words and made it sound like me, right? That's what that is. Now, we could also have text to speech, right, where you could take written words and then if it's, if you've trained the voice, right. So I could, let's say I wanted to put up social content and I'm sitting on a plane and I'm writing, I can't record, but I'm writing the words. Writing the words, writing the words. Could it then take my words, have it sound like me and turn it into an audio or even a video?


Absolutely. You, so many things are happening here. You can just say, give me five tips for brides the day of the wedding. And like at my bed and breakfast, I created a wedding emergency kit and it was this cute little bag and it had scotch tape or, you know, yeah, tape. It had scissors, it had just these things that people kept asking for, right, emergency wise, on the day of a wedding. So you could say what goes into an emergency kit, but you don't even have to say it. You could just type it up while you're running around. You could ask chat GPT to give you some tips if you want it, help.


Because not everybody is a content creator by choice or has that as a mindset. And, and then you take those words and you say, use my voice. And believe it or not, the voice that I used with you and the voice that I used with me is the cheap voice they have, the expensive voice that is much more in depth. So the cheap voice, I can create ten voices with 1 minute of content that I can use over and over. That means I can go and steal people. And here's the ethics part of it. It has a box that says, are you sure you're allowed to use it? I'm like, yeah, I wink with both eyes. I'm sorry about that.


Yes, check mark. And so it's, that's a scary part. But you could just talk to it for a couple of minutes. You don't even have to record it because it'll take it right there. We're talking about a company called eleven Labs, by the way, if you want to look this one up, but there are several of them doing this right now. And I can envision that somebody who's very busy taking care of brides and grooms, people, maybe you have a venue and you still want to get tips out, or you want to tell some stories about some of the best things you've seen, some best ideas you've seen. You can just type them out, apply your voice, and get them out there on social media. And a lot of the other tools, and we're not going to get into a whole bunch of them today.


In fact, I'm not going to get into any more at all. Maybe a lot of other tools, though. You just tell them what you want to say, and it'll find b roll, which is like little bits of video or little pictures or whatever to illustrate your point without you actually having to make a video. So you're talking about running around saying a few for dictating a few words or asking chat GPT for a few words, popping it into a couple of these automated tools and popping out really good content.


Yeah. And again, pictures, video and so forth, all of this audio. So what I wanted to do in the beginning was just illustrate the fact that there's my intro, but it was actually you speaking the words, sounding like me. And again, you had my permission to do so. And that's where a lot of this gets into this gray area. I was actually reading an article today in the Wall Street Journal about how Scarlett Johansson is suing chat GPT because in the movie her, she was an artificial intelligence voice, and they have a voice that's similar. And they had asked her about doing business with them, and she said no. And they said they did this before they asked her and all.


And they say, you know, it doesn't sound like her. And she says it does sound like her. And all this and this is where you get into this kind of kind of a gray area here. And that's, again with me. You know, I want to stay completely black and white. I want to use my content, but how do I use these tools? So the document that I created, thanks to watching you do one on stage, was I asked my virtual assistant, and she's a real person, though. She's just not here in the office. I said, take go find our five most downloaded podcasts and ask cast magic, which is an AI tool, kind of like a Chechi Bt kind of thing, and said, give us the top ten tips out of these five.


Now, I could have gone in there, listen to what I had said, pulled out those tips. It would have taken me way, way longer. I then edited them. I got rid of some, kept most edited, edit a few in there, and then created a document from my content. It was still my content there, but I didn't tell you this before we got on, but what's happened recently, I'm not sure if you're following it, is Amazon's KDP Kindle. Direct publishing has virtual voices now. And I had two of my books in English that were not on audio. I did all of my other ones on audio, and these two were not on audio because they were too similar to another book.


They're just different versions of a book. So if you're watching on video, you'll see three orange covers behind me. They're the same book, but one of them is just specifically for DJ's and bands and photo booths. One is specifically for caterers and venues. And I even say in the preface, it's the same book. If you read the other version, it's the same book. I don't want anybody to think that wasn't the same book. So I didn't do them on audio because I just, you know, I have the original book.


Well, they came and said, would you like to have the DJ band version and the caterer venue version? Would you like to have that done with a virtual voice? And I did the Scooby Doo look, right? What? And they gave me ten voices to pick from. There were seven female voices, three male voices. My wife liked the australian woman's voice. I said, I do too, but I don't think anybody wants to listen to my book read by an australian woman. So there you go. Maybe I would, I don't know. So we picked the voice and that afternoon it was done. And you can go in and fix pronunciations and things.


Well, what's just happened recently is they now offer in Spanish in addition to English. So now it's only English and Spanish. I have seven of my books, you know, seven of my books, Desponiblia and Espanol. But I wasn't going to do the audio because it's just not on my priority list, you know, to spend that much time in the studio for that where I might not have as big of an audience as I do in English. Well, now all seven books, because I told them in the morning, yes, in the afternoon, all seven books are available now in Spanish. Now it's not my voice. We're not telling anybody this is my voice. But theoretically or not theoretically, reality is, couldn't I do that.


Like, couldn't I have my voice cloned, reading something in Spanish and then tell it to have me read the book? Like, how would I do that?


You would give it the book and say, apply this voice.


Is that eleven labs or who do I give that to?


Eleven labs. I pay $5 a month for it. So it's not the deluxe version.


Right.


But they do have other longer versions. And the thing is, so I'm talking about eleven labs. You talked about cast magic. I don't know when this is going to air, but it doesn't matter. Those will be one of 75 million who do the same thing. And I keep telling people, because I'm the app queen, right? I can tell you, I know more apps than I had husbands, but that's not very many numbers. But I definitely am not focusing on the names of the apps anymore. I'm focusing on the functionality without it that's out there.


So if you want to say, clone my voice to create a spanish version of my book, you will have 50 apps that come up or 50 tools that come up and say, guess what? We can clone your voice in Spanish and read your whole book. And it's going to cost. Not all these are samples, right, but you know, or the, or the starter versions, but they're everywhere. And think about, there's a lot of challenge that's going in ethically to the kind of things that we can create. Voiceover artists and narrators are amazing. They have such craft. They work so hard, they practice, they preach, they're skilled beyond measure. And now with, I don't know, just a yes to Amazon, you have taken away something that used to go to a person.


So we're getting into this challenge, but we do have celebrities who are now loaning their voices to be cloned. I forgot which one I was on the other day. It might have been eleven labs still. And yes, it was. And they have a couple of celebrities. I think they're like reality tv celebrities. I missed their tv shows, but I, and they are famous celebrities who have had their voice cloned very professionally. Like I said, I did the free, pretty much the free version.


There's a really deluxe version which is, you know, like $20 a month, still not very expensive. And you can buy their voice and you can buy real voiceover artists voices and just have them do it. So going back to what wedding businesses can do, think about all the things you say and all the things you do, thinking about, think about going through the logistics that you need to go through with somebody on the phone or on a zoom, think about your contracts. Think about the people that, who ask you certain questions. Think about the characteristics of your cakes or of your venue or of the clothing you produce, those kind of things. All those questions that people are asking you, you can make content for in your own voice. And we didn't even talk about the, using your own face and moving the lips and lip dubbing it. We did a little bit.


But you can use your own face. You can use your own voice. And sometimes it's funny if you say this is me, but it's not me, right? You know, if you, if you put it out there that you don't pretend to be there and you don't pretend to be saying it, you're telling them, hey, I am the AI wedding bot for this venue, and I'm going to tell you the five things that people always ask.


Nice. Yeah. In my, the beginning of all the audiobooks that are done by virtual voice on Amazon, it says that. It says it on there. The document that I created using the tools that you gave me. I said this was created with the assistance of chat GPD and then edited by. Put both of our names over there. Just trying to be transparent about it, although I feel totally confident in the content because it's my content.


I just had a conference I'm going to in the UK, and they asked me for an article to go into their next magazine. And I said, well, I could sit and write an article, but I said, here's a topic. I've already done a podcast about this. And I went in and I had the Aihdeene write me a 750 word article from this. I read the entire thing. I wasn't going to just say, here, send it off. I read the entire thing. I changed very little.


Very, very little, because what I also learned at this conference from you and others, it's all about the prompts. It's how you tell it to do it. If I say, give me a 750 word article, I'll get an article. But if I say, give me a 750 word article, the audience are professional disc jockeys and photo booth operators who are. And then the longer the description, I think. And that's why it was so much more appropriate and so little. I had to change because I gave it better instructions, just like a person, right? I mean, if you're going to have a. Here, if I said to my assistant here, write me a 750 word article, and that's all I said, I'm going to have to do a lot of editing.


So with the same idea over there. So assuming that everybody listening is doing it ethically, and we would hope that you would and everything it really could, we always talk about, how do you guys save time? How do I get my social posts? How do I get all this kind of stuff there? This is a way to have these tools give you this type of content, as long as you invest in the right tool. And I know you said you have the $5 a month version of something or whatever. We have free versions. I know I pay for the chat GPT, the dollar 20 a month and all that. I always think, invest in your business the way you want people to invest in you. If you're going to really create a lot of content, don't go for the free version. Don't go for the $5 version.


Pay something for that to do that. Okay, what do you see is coming? This stuff is already coming out as like a fire hose here. But what else is coming that you see that might be we should be watching for?


One of the things that's coming here is that it's so easy to create content, that everybody is creating so much content. So even though this is just a caution, really, just be aware that your stuff really has to say something. And it can't be just, I have to put up a video because people say, I have to put up a video that you say something that helps people. I always talk about helping your clients be better clients, helping your customers be better customers. What can you do there? And just make sure that it's sincere. It's your voice, it's real. What is coming is what I think will be flawless clones. It's funny, when we first started generating pictures and all of this happened within a year and a half, 17 months since chat GPT came out.


Now, there were other things that were out before that, and so I was chat GPT before chat GPT, but still, like, they were like, oh, you can tell because the fingers are weird and the eyes are crossed or whatever. And within a month, those kind of things were gone, those kind of problems. And so now people are like, oh, you can hear this stilted text, you can hear. That is not right. You know, you and I were playing around with different versions of what we ended up with, and some of them had a lisp. Lisp. I don't. I think I just had a lisp when I said lisp, but I don't have a lisp, and you don't have a lisp.


And some of them had a lisp. We don't understand that. And people are like, uh huh. You can tell because neither one of them have a lisp. And now we have a list. Wait till next week. So I think we're going to get to flawless cloning and almost completely indecipherable cloning from ourselves. And there's going to be a lot of it.


So use it with discretion. Use it wisely, but use it, use it. It's a great equalizer for people who have there are people who can do this. The social media thing, I got it. I'm going to post my cakes. I'm going to post my things. I got my dj stuff up there. I'm on it.


And the other people are like, they're all on it. I'm not on it. I don't even know where it went. And obviously they haven't worked with you yet because they need to, but they're busy and they don't know where to get started. This is the great equalizer. This is your chance to take, I'm going to say the easy route because it is easy to create content if you just step up and learn a few things. So it's a great equalizer as long as you stay authentic. I think it's going to benefit you in a whole bunch of different ways.


Yeah. Again, like any tool, the more you learn how to use it, the more you're going to get out of it, you know, if you learn how to use chat GPT and I watched the video because just before this is being recorded, chat GPT 40 came out and I was watching some of the stuff and it's, again, scary in a good way. But you also understand how nefarious, you know, people can do that, but they were doing there was a live translation. So the one woman is Italian is her first language. So she said something in Italian. It told the man what she said. He said something in English. The app said it in Italian to her.


And, you know, there's a lot of use of that if you travel, right? If you have somebody that's lost and you don't speak their language, I mean, look, you know that you could be very helpful with this stuff. You could learn chat GPT the prompts well and say, hey, chat GPT I'm lost for an idea for my social posts for next month, and it learns your business. Give me ten ideas that I can use and then it gives you ten ideas and you use four of them. And every week you have a post now, right? I mean, these are the ways you could do it the ebook that you created for us on stage, and you told it to give you 26 different ideas and then have them start with the letter, each letter of the Alphabet. Next thing you know, it's a through z, and then it's in a spreadsheet and then it's being it was just amazing because you know how to use it. And I think that's the thing. When I first went into chat GPT I got okay answers because I didn't give it good direction. And then we started to learn to give it better direction, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, wow, okay, this is really good here.


So definitely going to put some links. So in the you'll send me the links, I'll put into the show notes for some of the stuff that we played around with, which was was it me sounding like you? No, you sound you sounding like me because you cloned my voice. Right.


I think we went back and forth. I think we did both connected now.


Alan, we absolutely, absolutely are. Absolutely are. We are so connected that you came on because I asked you to. And I so appreciate that. My nerdy best friend Beth. So Beth Z, I'll put it in the show notes. But how do people find out more about you?


Believe it or not, my website is your nerdybestfriend.com because that's who I am.



That is for sure who she is. And it's just blowing my mind here. Where's that blow the mind graphic you had?


Oh yeah. Oh yeah.


There you go.


See, I don't even know how got this one, too.


What?

I know, right?


So those of you who are listening are not seeing this, but Beth on the screen looks like she's on an IMAX screen, whereas I look like I'm just in my office here, and then she has these graphics that come up and now she is in a circle. So those of you that are watching on YouTube, you're actually seeing all this. Those of you who are listening are not seeing any of this good video. You might want to go over to my YouTube channel, winning business solutions and see that. So, Beth, I'm going to put all this into the show notes. I will have you on again with the next iteration that is blowing our minds over here. Thank you so much for sharing your wonderful wisdom on my nerdy best friend, and let's have some more fun with this.


Thanks. Thanks for having me.


I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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