Voice cloning and deepfakes: what we do, what we don't, and why it matters
We keep seeing a version of this concern in comments and messages, and it's worth addressing directly: Is this the same technology as deepfakes? What happens to my voice recording? Who's stopping someone from using this to put words in people's mouths?
Those are fair questions. AI voice synthesis has a genuinely bad reputation in some of the ways it's been used. The technology that makes a touching personalized audiobook is the same technology that's been used to make fraudulent robocalls and non-consensual audio impersonations. We understand why someone would hesitate.
Here's our honest answer to each of those concerns.
Is this the same as deepfakes?
The underlying technology is similar, yes. The use case is the opposite.
Deepfakes make someone appear to say something they never said, usually without their knowledge, and usually with intent to deceive. A parent recording a bedtime story for their own child — or a grandparent recording their voice for a grandchild they can't see often enough — is doing the exact reverse: knowingly creating something, with full awareness of what it is, for people they love.
The technology is a tool. A kitchen knife and a scalpel use the same metal. What matters is who has it, for what purpose, with whose agreement.
What we require before we clone any voice
We require explicit consent from the person whose voice is being cloned before we accept any order. Not assumed consent. Not consent on behalf of someone else. The person whose voice we're cloning needs to have agreed.
When someone places an order, they attest to this at checkout. If we have reason to believe a voice sample was recorded without the subject's knowledge — or submitted by someone other than the voice owner without permission — we won't fulfill the order.
In practice, almost all of our orders are people recording their own voice to make an audiobook for their own child or grandchild. The consent question is simple: you are the person consenting.
Occasionally someone orders an audiobook in a spouse's or parent's voice as a gift. That's the case where we depend on the customer's attestation. If you're ordering in someone else's voice and they haven't agreed, that's a violation of our terms of service and we won't fulfill it.
What happens to the voice recording
We don't keep it.
The voice model is generated from the sample and used to produce the audiobook. Once the order is fulfilled, the voice model is deleted. We don't retain a library of customer voice clones. We don't sell, license, share, or repurpose voice data. There's no database of customer voices sitting on a server somewhere.
We also don't use customer voice recordings to train models. The clone is made for your order and disappears with it.
What we can't control
We can be honest about this too. The finished MP3 is a file. Once we deliver it, the family can do what they want with it. We can't prevent a file from being shared or misused once it leaves our hands — no service can. What we can do is require consent on the front end, refuse orders that look like they're intended for misuse, and be clear in our terms about what the audio is licensed for (personal family use).
We're not naive about the technology's dual-use potential. We chose to use it for something that genuinely helps families, with consent built in at every step, knowing that someone else might use the same underlying technology badly. We think the answer to AI misuse isn't to not use AI — it's to use it transparently, with consent, for purposes that are clear and humane.
A note for grandparents specifically
If you've seen an ad for this service and your first reaction was concern about deepfakes — that's a healthy instinct and we're glad you asked. Talk to your adult child or the parents of your grandchild before ordering. They should know what this is, agree to it, and be the ones deciding when and how the audiobook gets played. That kind of transparency is exactly what makes a use of this technology legitimate rather than not.
If you have more questions, email us at [email protected]. We'd rather answer a hard question than lose a customer who had a reasonable concern we didn't address.