US firm Veritone is launching a new platform called Marvel.AI that will let creators, media figures, and others generate deepfake clones of their voice to license as they wish.

“People want to do these deals but they don’t have enough time to go into a studio and produce the content,” Veritone president Ryan Steelberg tells The Verge. “Digital influencers, athletes, celebrities, and actors: this is a huge asset that’s part of their brand.”

With Marvel.AI, he says, anyone can create a realistic copy of their voice and deploy it as they see fit. While celebrity Y is sleeping, their voice might be out and about, recording radio spots, reading audiobooks, and much more. Steelberg says the platform will even be able to resurrect the voices of the dead, using archive recordings to train AI models.

Although Veritone markets itself as an “AI company,” a big part of its revenue apparently comes from old-school advertising and content licensing. As Steelberg explains, its advertising subsidiary Veritone One is heavily invested in the podcast space, and every month places more than 75,000 “ad integrations” with influencers. “It’s mostly native integrations, like product placements,” he says. “It’s getting the talent to voice sponsorships and commercials. That’s extremely effective but very expensive and time consuming.”

Another part of the firm, Veritone Licensing, licenses video from a number of major archives. These include archives owned by broadcasters like CBS and CNN and sports organizations like the NCAA and US Open. “When you see the Apollo moon landing footage show up in movies, or Tiger words content in a Nike commercial, all that’s coming through Veritone,” says Steelberg. It’s this experience with licensing and advertising that will give Veritone the edge over AI startups focusing purely on technology, he says.

To customers, Marvel.AI will offer two streams. One will be a self-service model, where anyone can pick from a catalog of pre-generated voices and create speech on demand. But the other stream — “the focus,” says Steelberg — will be a “managed, white-glove approach,” where customers submit training data, and Veritone will create a voice clone just for them. The resulting models will be stored on Veritone’s systems and available to generate audio as and when the client wants. Marvel.AI will also function as a marketplace, allowing potential buyers to submit requests to use these voices.