"Make this sound more human" 🤖

Hi Non-Techies,

I headlined Technology for Marketing at the Excel centre last week, which I’m mentioning mostly because it gives me an excuse to share this awesome pic with you:

Becoming an AI trainer is the best thing I’ve ever done, so I built a 12-week bootcamp that’ll turn you into an AI trainer too. Click the button below to learn more:

In today’s newsletter, I’m sharing a useful prompt, a tool that can actually clone my brummie accent, and discussing the US Government’s AI tool of choice.

Bibs on, let’s dig in.

Finally, an AI-generated brummie accent 🎤 

I tried Synthesia’s new voice clone tool the other day and I was really impressed.

AI voice cloning isn’t new, but I’ve tried plenty of tools, and none of them could ever do my voice. If you’ve never heard me speak, I’m from the rough end of Birmingham (the UK version), so you know, I don’t exactly sound like the Queen.

Synthesia’s voice cloning tool is the first I’ve discovered that can do it. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn good.

I was also really impressed at how easy Synthesia made it for me. A lot of voice cloning tools learn your voice by asking you to speak solidly for two minutes, but have you ever tried to do that? Either you start speaking gibberish, or you read, and none of those are particularly great examples of how you actually talk.

Synthesia walks you through the process, giving you prompts to ensure you’re not lost for words.

Oh - and their trust centre is epic.

Why does this matter?

If I can clone my voice, I can start to scale my content output. I could create podcasts (and in loads of different languages), training videos for my team, even YouTube videos: It all becomes easier with great voice cloning.

It’s only available on the Enterprise plan at the moment, but it’s a really promising development in this space.

A prompt you might find useful 🧠

Chatbots have come a long way, but even my beloved Claude can still feel a bit…well, a bit like AI is doing the writing. If feedback sessions in 2025 had a bingo card, “It sounds like AI wrote it” would surely be on it somewhere.

As it turns out, that might be a prompting issue, not a tech issue.

We tested this prompt in the AI Academy yesterday, which claims to be able to coax any chatbot into writing like a real human.

The results were pretty good. It still needed a bit of further prompting to get it totally right, but some of that comes down to personal preference.

Which reminds me: If you ever need to refine a prompt with extra prompts to get what you want, be sure to ask ChatGPT (or your chosen AI chatbot) to give you a new prompt at the end that factors in all of the new information you’ve given it. It’ll save you the trouble next time!

GrokAI for $0.42 👀

Sorry, but not for you. Elon Musk is only extending this offer to those who need it most: The US Government.

It’s the latest in an intriguing battle amongst AI companies - namely, OpenAI, Anthropic and Grok - to become the AI provider of choice for the US Government.

OpenAI and Anthropic have already offered full, enterprise use of their platforms for a dollar. Not to be outdone, Musk has gone in at $0.42 for a year and a half of usage. I can only assume the $0.42 is an in-joke, but I won’t discuss it further because of spam filters.

On first glance, it’s kinda hard to see why these companies are so keen to charge so little. Clearly, each sees a big advantage to being the government’s go-to AI tool, presumably because it gives them even more legitimacy. You can read the full story here if you’re intrigued by this bizarre bidding war.

Some other cool stuff we found this week 😎

📲 OpenAI have released ChatGPT Pulse: an assistant that can send daily updates, reminders or tips based on your calendar, other integrations and manual requests. It’s only available at the Pro level, mind you.

💌 Perplexity has launched a “personal assistant for your inbox” that organises your emails, drafts replies and organises meetings. Like ChatGPT Pulse, it’s only available at the top subscription tier ($200/pm!). Pretty steep.

🌍 Al Gore (that’s Al as in Albert, not Artificial Intelligence) has released an AI tool that can monitor global pollution, using 660 million data sources. Read more about it here.

Okay, I’m off to ask Anthropic if they’ll give me Claude for $1. Hey, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

See you next week,

Heather and the AIFNT team.