Welcome to Crash AI: How Robert ‘Crash’ Craddock became the new voice of the summer of cricket

If you think you’ve heard it all, you haven’t until you listen to the new voice of the summer of cricket. Welcome to Crash AI, Robert Craddock as you’ve never heard him before.

There is, of course, only one Crash Craddock.

But now through the use of cutting edge AI voice cloning technology, during the summer of cricket Crash can be in more places than one.

Our effervescent sports writer Robert “Crash” Craddock’s vocals have been perfectly cloned to enable him to voice over highlight videos without needing to do anything more than type up a script.

“Effectively, I can be in two places at one time – I can be at the cricket and yet offsite (video editors) can be producing my voice on the highlights of the day and I don’t have to be there,” says Crash.

“It’s exciting.”

To clone his voice, Crash went through a lengthy process of reading about 30 scripts over a cumulative period of four hours in a recording studio. The voice recordings were then edited to remove any stumbles, stutters or “mouth sounds” and then sent to a voice cloning specialist company in the UK. That company, BeyondWords, then trained its base voice model with Crash’s recordings and three weeks later produced Crash’s “clone”.

PRESS PLAY BELOW: Crash hears his AI Voice for the first time.

Crash found the process “more difficult than I thought it would be”.

“You think you’re just reading these scripts but simple words like ‘Sheffield Shield’, I stumbled on it about 20 times and by the end of it I couldn’t even say it,” he says. “You realise your fallibility. I’ve got new respect for news readers.”

The first time Crash heard his own voice speak back to him was a surreal experience for the popular sports writer. He broke into that infectious, full-body laugh, saying: “That is my voice, it really is! It’s very, very clever.”

Crash Craddock AI is the new voice of cricket. Picture: Kelly Barnes

News Corporation Australia’s General Manager of Editorial Innovation, Rod Savage, says the technology could be a game changer for busy reporters.

“Instead of having to find a soundproof room in a cricket stadium, do a perfect recording, send that recording to a remote team and hope they don’t want any changes made, Crash can now just type in his script and within five minutes the system has generated the voice over,” he says.

Robert Craddock here's back his own AI voice for the first time

“If there’s a mistake in pronunciations, that can all just be fixed in the system, Crash doesn’t need to worry about it.

“It now means Crash can deliver his expert insights to a broad audience across all formats – be that print, digital, video or audio – without having to run around everywhere. There’s just not enough time in the day for reporters to produce content in all formats, they need a bit of help from technology.”

Crash has certainly enjoyed the help from his clone and is becoming a little fond of his “digital twin”.

“It makes more sense than I do, I reckon,” he laughs.

But he says it’s not a perfect clone.

“The one difference is that one doesn’t make mistakes, but I make a million of them!”

CRASH TEST DUMMY VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS WILL FEATURE EVERY DAY OF THE TEST.

Originally published as Welcome to Crash AI: How Robert ‘Crash’ Craddock became the new voice of the summer of cricket