Anthony Bourdain's voice for his documentary Roadrunner recreated by AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recreated Anthony Bourdain's voice for use in the upcoming documentary Roadrunner. In a report by IndieWire, director of Anthony Bourdain's documentary Roadrunner Morgan Neville said that the whole team is using Anthony's voice for over a dozen hours to narrate the documentary. However, the team still did not have the audios in three situations, then, the team turned to artificial intelligence to get what they needed.

How Neville created Bourdain's voice in his documentary?

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Morgan Neville said that there is a moment at the end of the film's second act when the artist David Choe, Anthony Bourdain's friend, is reading aloud an email Bourdain had sent him. Choe began reading, but it merged got merged with Bourdain's voice in between. The New Yorker also asked Neville that how the team found Bourdain's audio of reading his own email. In reply, Neville said that there is no such thing, the team just reached out to four software companies about recreating Bourdain's voice with the help of artificial intelligence. They selected the best company out to those four and sent them over a dozen hours of recordings.

Further, Neville claimed that no one would be able to know about the lines spoken by artificial intelligence in Anthony Bourdain's documentary. However, Bourdain's recreated audio with the help of artificial intelligence is receiving a backlash on social media, citing that the film critic Sean Burns was not aware of such a decision before writing his review. 

About Anthony Bourdain's documentary

Directed by Academy Award winner Morgan Neville, “Roadrunner, the film about Anthony Bourdain's life hit the theatres today. Bourdain shot to fame after the publication of his frank, behind-the-scenes account of restaurant life in “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” in 2000 and became a beloved culinary travel guide with his CNN series “Parts Unknown". The final act of Roadrunner is infused with a feeling of dread. Bourdain had become involved with Italian actor Asia Argento, an accuser in the case of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. She directed an episode of his Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in Hong Kong. Fans saw how the news of a tabloid publishing her pictures of her with the other man, shortly before his death during filming in eastern France.

(IMAGE: AP)