This past Tuesday (July 15, 2025), I appeared on a news segment on Tampa’s WFLA Channel 8 evening news, where I was brought in to comment about ways to not fall for AI-powered phone scams. The video from that news segment is pictured above.
While the segment talked about using AI to mimic people’s voices and faces and have them say whatever you want, there wasn’t time to demonstrate this capability — so I’m doing it here.
Here’s a video I recorded back in October 2023 to promote a Python course that I was teaching:
I then fed that video to HeyGen, the AI avatar service, and used it to translate my video into Spanish. Here’s the result:
I don’t speak Spanish anywhere as fluently and smoothly as my HeyGen-generated version, and note that HeyGen went so far as to sync my lips with the Spanish words!
The Spanish voice is also a decent approximation of mine — close enough that it might fool even people who know me well, given a stressful situation full of emotion and other distractions, which is the sort of scenario that con artists try to create in a phone scam.
You should also note that the Spanish video was made with the version of HeyGen from October 2023. I’m sure it’s undergone significant improvements since then.