Congressional candidate Sam Liccardo is using AI to speak to voters
PALO ALTO, Calif. (KGO) -- With less than 30 days to the election and a laryngitis diagnosis, Congressional District 16 candidate Sam Liccardo is turning to artificial intelligence voice technology as he has no voice.
During a meet and greet in Palo Alto Monday afternoon, Liccardo used Speechify, an app that reads aloud text.
He submitted a 20-second sample of a previous speech so the voice would sound like him.
ABC7 played a clip of Liccardo's real voice and the synthetic one.
"In elections, victory goes to the nimble. We're hustling to do all that we can to continue to communicate with residents," Liccardo said via AI.
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For ABC7 News reporter Lauren Martinez, it was a first to ask a question to someone and receive an answer via AI.
Liccardo would type his response before the computer read it aloud in his voice.
Merve Hickok is the president of Center for AI and Digital Policy.
"He was upfront about his laryngitis and why he's using it and how he's using it so he was transparent about it, I think that one is a good use case," Hickok said.
She added it also highlights the power of the tool.
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"It raises awareness of how cheap easy and quick it is now to create this," Hickok said.
UC Berkeley Associate Research Professor Andrew Reddie said your voice is effectively a fingerprint of you.
"I think one thing that could be said about synthetic voices is that there are no established rules of the road of how things can be used downstream and so we get fairly comfortable with tools like these ones because we feel as if we have control over how they're being used," Reddie said.
He explained the corporation providing the service ultimately has ownership over that.
Reddie added that the technology is designed to get as close as possible to human speech.
"Knowing on the backend what's actually AI generated voice versus not is next to impossible to tell so the detector tools that we have - they're certainly behind the state-of-the-art technology," Reddie said.
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Liccardo's opponent Evan Low said their team is doing everything they can to get their message out.
"You know maybe a few months beforehand maybe individuals were not paying attention wasn't the type of engagement but now we're down to the wire, ballots are arriving, people are paying attention, and it's very exciting now where we can capture their attention and say how can we best impact the quality of life for you each and every day," Low said.
Low emphasized voting.
"If anything matters please know every vote counts, and that makes it that much more significant especially coming from this district and the results we saw in the Primary Election," Low said.
Liccardo is planning for a few more days of vocal rest.
"I'm keeping to my doctor's orders and keeping my mouth shut until then," Liccardo said via AI.
