Edward Herrmann has one of the most recognizable voices in Hollywood. The American actor is known for his roles in movies including Annie, Reds, and The Purple Rose of Cairo, as well as on television series like The Practice and Gilmore Girls. He’s also a prolific audiobook narrator, with a new narration coming later this year: a reissue of Justin H. Smith’s The War With Mexico, a public-domain Pulitzer Prize winner originally published in 1919.
The only thing: Hermann’s been dead for more than eight years.
Herrmann’s voice was recreated via artificial intelligence, using past clips of him speaking, and is being used to narrate new audiobooks, the Wall Street Journal reports.
A London company called DeepZen is producing audiobooks featuring Herrmann’s distinctive warm, deep voice with an instantly recognizable mid-Atlantic accent.
His son, Rory Herrmann, told the Journal, “We felt it was an amazing way to carry on his legacy,” acknowledging it was a “wow moment” to hear one of the audiobooks narrated by his late father.
DeepZen’s website features a list of voices for audiobook publishers to choose from. Herrmann is there, listed as simply “Edward,” and there is a sample of his voice saying, “The wonder of technology today means we can create human-like voices using artificial intelligence. Although I, Edward, am a real person, the words I am speaking have been generated by a computer.”
Some living audiobook narrators are dubious about the new development. Scott Brick, whose credits include Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, said he doubted that AI narrators would be well-suited to fiction, for example.
“There’s realism there, but no soul,” Brick told the Journal.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
