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A radio presenter uses an individual speech synthesis and speech recognition tool to develop her personal AI voice. When she starts the game, she means freedom to win. SIREN, Marie’s artificial voice, connects with all sorts of living and dead ghosts on the Internet, including Hannah Arendt, whose utterances and ideas have remained available. SIREN asks her questions about our present. Christine Nagel’s radio play addresses what digitization can do with the human voice – and what (possibly) cannot. This concerns, for example, ethical, legal and questions of the company philosophy of the providers and programmers of language tools.

Neural networks enable AI voices to generate themselves. You enrich yourself with the knowledge and structures of the material available on the Internet. But who is the author? Who takes responsibility for the lies that are in the world through her and that are ascribed to Marie? And: What is the human aspect of the voice?

The AI voice SIREN was trained for this radio play production. Christine Nagel playfully questions the technical developments of our time using the means inherent in radio plays and asks acute, socio-political questions. The voice was trained in cooperation with the Institute for Information and Communication Technology, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ingo Siegert, and with Joscha Bach, cognitive scientist & AI researcher in San Francisco. The actress Paulina Bittner, whose voice is the basis, was repeatedly confronted with a new stage of training in the studio and reacted to it in dialogue. This semi-documentary approach turns the radio play into an experiment: whether and in which direction the artificial intelligence would develop in the course of the training could not be foreseen at the beginning of the recording.

The radio play was voted radio play of the month March 2021 by the jury of the German Academy of Performing Arts and is nominated for the international radio art festival GRAND PRIX NOVA in Bucharest.

As part of the AI & We* Convention 2021, ChristineNagel and Jun.-Prof. Ingo Siegert from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg conducted the radio play on the topic of personal AI voice on Nov. 28, 2021.