Voicemod Founder on Why Voice is Key to the Metaverse: A Meta Talkz with Jaime Bosch

Jaime Bosch is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Voicemod (www.voicemod.net), the next step in the future of social audio experiences. Voicemod is the tool that helps people find the voice that best expresses themselves as they play, work, create, and entertain. Jaime co-founded Voicemod in 2014 along with his brothers Fernando (chief technology officer) and Juan (chief product officer). Headquartered in Valencia, Spain, Voicemod is their third successive family-run business.

What was your journey like to get where you are? 

After earning a degree in sound and imaging in my hometown of Valencia, I joined my two brothers in their interactive studio for developing mobile applications. I eventually became chief creative officer, responsible for marketing, sales, and customer service. At the same time, my brothers and I were also running a creative audiovisual studio, working in graphic design, web design, and multimedia. During this period, I also took on side projects such as working as a camera operator on a television series as well as working in digital video and claymation film shorts. I even directed and edited a documentary on a Spanish rock band!

In 2009, we experimented with combining technology and music to create a music app called the Voicemod Experience. Over the following five years, we perfected the technology for enabling people to change and augment their voices in real-time, tweaking it to address its key benefit: the enjoyment people experienced when they were able to express themselves through a unique sonic identity.

We turned our fun little voice modulation project into a real business in 2014 and closed our other businesses. I took on the role of CEO and focused on securing investment, developing partnerships with companies like Agora, Bragi, and CORSAIR, and building a world-class team for designing novel and delightful sound experiences. We have more than 28 million downloads on desktop PCs alone.

In a simpler phrase, what is your company exactly doing?

Voicemod is shaping the future of social audio experiences by enabling avatars to have sonic identities in the metaverse. We leverage elements from state-of-the-art voice technology to facilitate voice conversion and transformation as accurately as possible — and are continually improving upon this process. Presently, Voicemod is the leading audio augmentation software among creative professionals, gamers, and content creators. We provide a fast, simple way to apply distinct voice skins and to create individualized audio scapes across a breadth of online communication platforms and video games. We aim to enable the whole metaverse ecosystem by utilizing our immersive audio experience technology in games and applications.

What about Metaverse are you most excited for in the future?

In online environments, your avatar is your entire self-representation. And really, who is that person without a voice? In the metaverse, the restrictions of physical reality will have no bearing on how we look or sound. Your digital avatar(s) will become whatever you wish to convey. It may be a reality you in digital, name-brand fashion, or you as a purple dragon with a cowboy hat. And while It’s easy to visualize what our avatars might look like, what will they sound like? Surely, you won’t want your cowboy-hat-wearing dragon to sound identical to your everyday human self.

We are very excited to see the demand for real-time voice augmentation capabilities grow exponentially in the near future as our digital selves evolve in the metaverse, the market expands, and competition increases.

Why should we be paying attention to the Metaverse?

We see a massive opportunity to help people express themselves in the metaverse in the way they would like to be heard. With our sonic identities, people can shape their voices to be something they feel comfortable with – or even slip into different voices for specific situations. Similar to the way graphical emojis have helped shape text communications, we want to empower people to use sound effects, music clips, and audio emojis to create ambiance, convey context, and implement comedic effects.

We expect major platform and game developers will be scrambling to have audio catch up with visual technology in the metaverse and will begin building voice modification capabilities into their platforms to produce fantasy and natural-sounding voices on-demand, in real-time​.