Gott Forever - Prologue

Aleš Vrzák / Czech Republic / 2023 / 2 min.

synopsis

The digital imprint of Karel Gott's voice was created from the sound recordings of Gott's show Zpátky si dám ten film broadcast on Czech Radio Two in 2011–2015. The obtained material was used to train a speech synthesis model based on deep neural networks. The artificial intelligence trained in this way retrieved selected passages from Karel Gott's autobiography, which were thoroughly checked by the voice synthesis editors. The Gott Forever project was co-produced by Czech Radio and Karel Gott Agency and in cooperation with SpeechTech, s.r.o. and the Research Center NTIS ZČU in Pilsen.

“In the case where we are creating a digital voiceprint of a deceased person, we have set the rules very strictly. Of the basic ones, the most important is that we can only use the voice created by artificial intelligence for texts that the person actually wrote or spoke. And the other important thing is that we are not allowed to take those sentences out of context and use them for any purpose other than what they were intended for.” — Ondřej Nováček, Programme Director of Czech Radio

Quote source: iROZHLAS.

biography

Aleš Vrzák (1970) is a radio director, reciter, lecturer, judge of shows and workshops. He has been working at Český Rozhlas (Czech Radio) for thirty years, currently in the position of chief director. He created the project Gott Forever in collaboration with the Czech Radio creative producer Lukáš Sapík.