The artificial intelligence company unveiled its new voice engine technology on Friday, just over a week after filing a trademark application for the name.

The company claims that it can recreate a person's voice with just 15 seconds of recording that person speaking.

OpenAI says it plans to test it with early testers, but “will not generally release this technology at this time” due to the risk of misuse.

“We recognize that producing speech that resembles people’s voices poses serious risks, which are particularly great in an election year,” the San Francisco company said in a statement.

In New Hampshire, authorities are investigating robocalls sent to thousands of voters just before the presidential primary that featured an AI-generated voice imitating President Joe Biden.

A number of start-up companies are already selling voice cloning technology, some of which are available to the public or to select business customers such as entertainment studios.

OpenAI says its initial voice engine testers agreed not to impersonate a person without their consent and to disclose that the voices are AI-generated.

The company, best known for its chatbot and image generator DALL-E, took a similar approach when it announced but did not widely release its video generator Sora.

However, a trademark application filed on March 19 shows that OpenAI is likely aiming to get into the speech recognition and digital voice assistant business.

Ultimately, improving this technology could help OpenAI compete with other voice products like Amazon's Alexa.

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At the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance meeting, the supervisors on the committee voted in favor of moving forward with the shelter at 711 Polk Street. The proposal will now go to the full Board of Supervisors for a final vote.

Several members of the Lower Nob Hill Neighborhood Alliance — a group that formed to push back against the proposal — called in to the meeting to voice their opposition to the shelter.

“We are worried it’s going to fail, and it’s going to fail all over our streets,” Susan Walsh, who has lived in the neighborhood since 2014, told ABC7 News.

RELATED: ‘Look around’: Advocates for South Bay’s unhoused residents concerned about delay of homeless count

Walsh said there are already several other homeless shelters in their district, including many in the vicinity around 711 Polk Street, and that the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood is unfairly impacted.

If you’re on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

“At some point we have to say, wait a minute, there’s a whole big city here,” Walsh explained. “And we don’t see these kinds of facilities popping up like in lower Nob Hill.”

If approved, the homeless shelter would have a maximum capacity of roughly 250 people and would be run by the nonprofit, Urban Alchemy. Supporters say a former youth hostel is an ideal space for a shelter since it’s already set up for communal living.

“I would urge us not to lose sight of the scale of this homeless population,” said one neighbor who called in support of the proposal. “We need shelter and support for people in this community who we’re currently failing. And delaying is a pretty shameful failing.”

RELATED: Has SF hit rock bottom? Former mayor says city’s ‘humanitarian’ ethic is to blame for recent issues

District 6 supervisor Matt Haney is among those in favor of the proposal.

“Shelter and transitional housing are solutions to homelessness and right now we don’t have enough spots for people,” he said at the meeting.

District 3 supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents the Lower Nob Hill area, joined the meeting on Wednesday even though he is not on the Budget and Finance Committee. He asked his fellow supervisors to delay a vote until some of the concerns can be further investigated and addressed.

“I think it’s critical if we are going to succeed in this case to address the crisis of homelessness on our streets, that the city has to perform superlatively,” Peskin said. “And if we don’t, it is going to make location of these types of facilities in other parts of the city much more difficult.”

The committee chose not to delay and voted to move forward with the plan. A city spokesperson for the proposal said Urban Alchemy will ensure there is an onsite case manager 24 hours a day. The shelter will also start at 150 people and scale up slowly over time.

RELATED: Oakland opens new tiny home village near Lake Merritt for the city’s unhoused

Walsh said she feels her neighborhood is becoming an extension of the Tenderloin. Despite some of their concerns being addressed, she’s concerned another shelter of any kind could make it worse.

“The other day there was a woman walking outside our apartment naked, just naked,” Walsh described. “There were people across the street having sex in the middle of the day and openly selling drugs.”

“That’s how our neighborhood is changing,” she continued. “That didn’t happen. This is all new.”

Copyright © 2022 KGO-TV. All rights reserved.

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In a conversation, composer and sound artist Ellen Reid uses the word “interstitial.” As if highlighted in brightest yellow in dense text on a computer screen, the word pops to attention as an apt definition of the sonic and frequently visual worlds her works occupy. Except, from the tiny fulcrum of this in-between space, Reid’s compositions extend like the spokes on a bicycle wheel to vast application: chamber orchestra works, pieces for classical and contemporary instrumental ensembles and choral groups, operas, film and television scores, sound design for art installations, and more.

Reid was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera, p r i s m. With composer Missy Mazzoli, she co-founded the Luna Composition Lab, a fellowship and mentorship program for young female, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming composers. Reid has a BFA from Columbia College at Columbia University, where she focused on musicology and computer music. Before earning an MA from California Institute of the Arts, she worked for several years at an international school in Thailand, a post that sparked her interest in opera.

Ellen Reid launched SOUNDWALK this year

Recent media attention draws focus to Reid as the first composer to have a world premiere with Los Angeles’ four major classical music institutions: the Los Angeles Philharmonic, LA Master Chorale, LA Chamber Orchestra and LA Opera. In the Bay Area, a work written for Kronos, SOUNDWALK, was recently presented in Golden Gate Park. Presented by the Kronos Festival in association with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, the free, GPS-enabled work allows users to experience a self-curated performance in which the walking path chosen by the listener determines the music heard. As a result, musical cells crafted to harmonize with the park’s landscape and attractions need never result in the same sound experience from one visit to the next.

The innovative, progressive, 21st-century tilt of Reid’s compositions makes it a wonderful surprise to find at the end of one “spoke” the music made unforgettable by all-girl groups of the 1960s: the Chiffons, the Shirelles, the Dixie Cups, the Shangri-Las, and others. Music of Memphis, Motown, and musical theater are as much a part of her backbone as is Eastern and Western classical and contemporary music. Reid speaks of her origins as a musician, the Luna Lab, her processes, winning the Pulitzer, and the fear she experiences at the cusp of each new project.

Tell me about the music you listened to while growing up: What music filled your ambient sound environment and what music did you intentionally listen to?

There are different environments. I grew up in East Tennessee, so we sang in church choir and that was pretty consistent. We rehearsed once a week and performed on Sundays. I also played piano. My parents met in Memphis and my dad grew up there. They were into music of their generation and Motown and music that originates in Memphis. Musicals were a big part of music we listened to as a family. As a younger person I listened to a lot of Top 40 hits on the radio and pop music, and also I was into older pop music like Simon and Garfunkel. And girl groups. I found that kind of thing beautiful. There was an album I had, The Best of the Girl Groups Volume 1 [a 36-track compilation on Rhino] I could sing the whole thing from soup to nuts. It was a CD and I still have it, but I don’t even have anything to play a CD anymore. Oh my gosh, it was so good.

Some people might not know about the origins of your interest — after the girl band phase was firmly established — in classical music. What story would you like to highlight?

I went to college in New York and was surrounded by tons of music from classical to experimental to jazz to everything under the sun. I started writing music for instruments while I was in college. It was for musicals and theater. If classical means instrumental, that started in college and it was [music written] to support another story.

What led you to write operas specifically?

I got a job teaching music in Thailand, and I had a wonderful experience working at a school. The second year, I worked at a theater in Bangkok that did Thai and Western fusion operas. The room between opera and theater in Thai traditional and folk music is way blurrier than here. Because their language is tonal, there’s a fuzzier line between those things. I loved theater and writing music for it and it was super interesting to bridge that with another set of musical rules.

And to work with different instrumentalists who were coming from a different place. We were making operas and it was interesting to me. There were different parts of storytelling, such as where sometimes you had a masked dancer onstage and their voice was from a chorus offstage. It made me more excited [about] opera than I had felt by traditional Western operas. It was coming from a place of storytelling, theater, and religion — all blurred together. It was so rich. It wasn’t Western opera put into a different tonality: The function was completely different. There is music created for functions and music created for casual listening. This kind of opera sat in a different place than Western opera.

A scene from Ellen Reid’s p r i s m | Credit: Larry Ho/LA Opera

There are many sonic worlds I feel I’m inhabiting when I listen to your work, among them fantastic magic and gritty reality. Will you speak about those two worlds?

Those are elements of growth and imagination. I wouldn’t set them as two separate things. I think of them on a spectrum where fantasy is a limit of imagination and reality is the grounding element. So what’s everything in-between? How are we moving? To grow, we have to imagine and then the whole work is moving our reality into that growth. The whole point is to move reality into and unite it into imagination so they become your lived reality. The reaching has to start with the imagination.

And the sonic surround of stories told based on personal memory, history, facts or science?

I see them all as grounding elements and from those we can spring further. Because it’s rooted in something current. What does that mean? Facts and science and personal experience are rooted in the now. It gives grounding for creative work to jump off from.

There comes a time in your creative process when editing or directional choices are made. Do they mostly happen in early development stages, periodically all through the process, or in final sprints when completing a score?

As far as editing choices related to instrumentation goes, there are two different ways. Sometimes a group reaches out and says here’s the instruments we have. Within that, there’s a little bit of negotiation, like, do you have an extra percussionist or can your piano player play a set? For the piece I wrote for Kronos Quartet [SOUNDWALK], it was inspired by the ensemble [itself] and is written for them as individual players.

In other works, where the ensemble isn’t given by the commissioning entity, then it’s something that happens really early in my process. It’s one of the first things I like to decide. Then you have something to work within, it helps to figure out the whole sound world, because those instruments move in different ways. If it’s a bunch of woodwinds, I can’t write things that gliss very much. Also, instruments have connotations. For example, in p r i s m, I decided to go with Romantic-sounding instruments to give a dreamy kind of feel. And then those instruments have to be able to contort to make something else later. Those decisions are directed by the story or the palette. It’s somewhere between the palette, the possibilities of the project in terms of numbers, and my phone book, my contacts. Who’s going to do a great job and who do I know?

Selecting one of your compositions, will you talk about the use of human voices and the importance of that element in your work?

I love writing for voice; it’s just that simple. When I’m writing for other instruments it usually comes from the human voice, even if it’s not an actual voice. Like when I’m writing for violin or horn, it still comes from a vocal place. One example of a piece that uses human voice in an unusual way is a piece I wrote for the New York Philharmonic called When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist. It’s for full orchestra and treble voice soloists. I wanted a sense of otherworldliness, adding vocals with no text, just oohs and aahs and muttering. The voices blended with the strings and woodwinds that created a haze around the piece that only the human voice can do. We’re trained as listeners to hear the voice in ways like no other. If there is a whole orchestra and then one voice comes in, we hear that voice. Our brain hears and prioritizes voices.

Are there both pitfalls and advantages to writing lyrics that tell stories? Do words inhibit a work or force literal interpretations of a work?

One kind of work, if you have lyrics, they usually take and center conveying the story of the text as the priority and define what the music can do. Another kind of work, if there are no lyrics, the listener creates their own world and own story. You know, even with lyrics and a strong story, the listener still creates their own story. But then, it’s so much more extreme. One person can say a piece resonates with them and then another person can say it resonates with them because of something completely different.

If the lyrics are conveying the story, I like to work closely with the writers to illuminate as much of the text as possible. There are works that need lyrics, but I also like writing works without lyrics that become more about timbre. I see lyrics and timbre more as a relationship with how you are using the voice. Is it voice as an instrument, or voice as a storyteller? Do you have to hear the words; get the story from what the person is saying? Or is the voice just a color? The story is then in the music and up to the listener.

When developing and composing film scores, what are the practices you hold onto and do the specific requirements and guidelines dictated by the artform (like time) stimulate your creativity or lead to unexpected solutions?

I like writing for film. It doesn’t feel different from writing for theater or opera or interstitial music. You’re drawing out what’s happening visually. In film you leave more room for the visuals than in opera. The music shouldn’t pull as much attention in a film. Because then it’s not supporting the image. It’s intuitive, knowing if something is too dense.

When you’re scoring a film, you’re looking at and feeling the image, feeling the pace, trying to bring out the action through the music. If it’s too heavy-handed, it doesn’t come from the storytelling of the film. It comes from somewhere else and doesn’t make the visual stronger. You want the experience to be unified. There’s only so much energy and you want to be giving, not taking, from the image.

Let’s talk about Luna Lab: What new directions are you pursuing and what will ensure it remains exploratory, authentic, vital to fellows and alumni composers?

Luna Lab is one of the most important things I do, and it’s so fulfilling. We’re bringing education to young female nonbinary and gender nonconforming composers. We’re bringing their work into the spotlight. Their work is so excellent that people are shocked. Some of our alums have been commissioned by St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Louisville has commissioned another one of our alumni.

Needless to say, the gender gap in music, especially in composition is huge. There are problems with the pipeline. We’re making sure our fellows and alumni are set up to apply to colleges with excellent recordings of their work which is a huge thing. We work with international contemporary ensembles and professional orchestras to record and perform the work of the alumni. Then they can apply to colleges with that work. That is powerful. They are getting into great composition programs. They’re set up to have a real career. They will be more savvy because they’ve been exposed to things and have a whole professional network to connect to.

Ellen Reid and Missy Mazzoli co-founded Luna Composition Lab

We have an alumni fund where fellows can apply for support for things that help them like composition lessons, a keyboard so they don’t have to walk across campus. We’re committed that all fellows can have theory class if they don’t already have it. Music education is obviously all over the place, depending on where you’re from. It’s important to have young talented artists connected with programs that are going to help them grow. Through the program, the alumni fund, and the network, we’re trying to get the young composers into professional positions. Our call for scores is even part of the mission. Some young kid is living where there aren’t female non-gender-conforming composers. When they hear that’s even a thing, maybe a seed is planted.

About the Pulitzer: So you win it. Then what do you do? Will it open doors for you and what do you want to do when you are “in the room?”

It’s such a crazy and wild experience and honor to win an award like that. I was totally… surprise isn’t the right word, but it was a positive trauma. It was 2019, and I got it, and then, shortly thereafter, COVID hit. But people are more interested in my work and in p r i s m and I don’t have to explain who I am as hard as before the award. It makes it easier to have ideas that are out[side] of the box.

People believe what you’re going to do is going to be good. A lot of concert music has been on pause for a while, so it’s meant both being able to create exciting outside of the box ideas and to have awesome collaborators like Kronos and the LA Philharmonic. To have an amazing team of groups and individuals who have championed SOUNDWALK … It’s so amazing; are you kidding me?

As a composer, do you set specific artistic goals for yourself or do you cast wide nets and follow the flow?

I set very loose goals. So much of being a freelancer and a creative person is being a collaborator with what’s around me. If something crazy comes in, I still have time to do it. I like to change it up, so I like working on an orchestral piece, and then a film score, and then a piece for dance. I like to move between different ways of making music so I structure my work for change or it starts to make me feel less excited. Exploring those different aspects of music making; the core music made in different ways is more exciting than doing the same things back-to-back.

Do next or new projects have you scared or unsure of where you might end up, even with the success you’ve experienced?

It happens every time, even if it’s something I’ve done before. If I wrote one orchestra piece and I have to write another one, it’s totally terrifying. With SOUNDWALK, there was a lot of unknown because it was working with a new technology. There’s always an aspect of thinking I can’t do it, even if I’ve done it before. Before the ideas start to come, there’s that blank page. It’s complete blank for every project before I start.

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People called her “the high priestess of the soul” or a jazz singer, but Nina Simone said her music contained more folk and blues than jazz. Dave Marsh, the music critic, suggested calling her a “freedom singer”. Bob Dylan said she was an artist he loved and admired, and the fact that she recorded his songs validated everything he did. Along with Dylan’s work, she performed songs by Animals, Leonard Cohen, and Jacque Brel. Kanye West sampled them in his songs. Barack Obama had her song “Sinnerman” on his workout playlist. The writers Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes were her close friends. She trained as a classical pianist and Bach was her favorite composer because of his technical perfection.

Raised in Tryon, North Carolina by a mother who was a Methodist preacher and a father who did everything he could get during the Depression, including a barber, handyman, and delivery driver, she had never been to a bar until she was playing at Midtown Bar & Grill in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and when asked what she would like to drink, asked for a glass of milk. When Vernon Jordan, the leader of the Urban League, asked her why she wasn’t more active in the civil rights movement, she replied, “I’m civil rights, motherfucker.”

Nina Simone

Simone (1933-2003) was uncategorizable and unique, making every song she sang her own. Born Eunice Waymon, she trained as a classical pianist and studied with Juilliard for a year, but was not accepted into the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia, a decision many attributed to racism. Simone was an activist during the civil rights movement and famously said that it is an artist’s duty to reflect on time. She left the United States and moved to Liberia, then Switzerland, before finally settling in southern France.

“Why? (The King of Love is dead)”

Nina Simone and her band played this song in Westbury Music Festival on Long Island, New York, 1968, three days after the death of Martin Luther King. They had just learned the song, which her bassist Gene Taylor wrote in response to King’s murder, and the song is angry, heartbreaking and catchy. Simone’s voice rings out as she sings: “Turn the other cheek he would plead / Love your neighbors was his creed / death in pain humiliation that he did not fear / With his Bible by his side / He did not hide from his enemies / It is hard to think this great man is dead. ‘The song appears on Simone’s 1968 live album’Said Nuff.

“To be young, talented and black”

Simone and her friend Lorraine Hansberry linked through civil rights and radical politics. Before she died of cancer at the age of 34, Hansberry was the author of A raisin in the sun, I spoke to a group of essay winners and said to them, “I wanted to come here and speak to you on this opportunity because you are young, gifted and black.”

Simone said the words were in her head and she was sitting at the piano writing the song she said felt like a gift from the playwright. Her band leader wrote the words and she told him to keep it simple, something that “will forever make black kids around the world feel good”. The song, which became something of a civil rights anthem, was released on the record in 1970 Black gold.

“Mississippi Goddam”

Simone wrote this song in response to the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls and to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi. She reportedly sat down and wrote the song that opens “Alabama got me so angry / Tennessee made me lose my calm / And everyone knows about Mississippi Goddam.” in less than an hour and said it felt like firing bullets at the members of the Ku Klux Klan who planted the dynamite in the church. Dick Gregory commented, “We all wanted to say it. She said, it. Mississippi, god damn it. “The song with intense, pungent lyrics and an uptempo beat became a famous protest song that some radio stations sent back in two parts. It was released in 1964 on the album Nina Simone in Concert.

“I wish I knew what it would feel like to be free”

This song was an instrumental written by Jazz pianist Billy Taylor, with lyrics later added by Dick Dallas. Simone recorded it for her 1967 album Silk and Soul and with lyrics like I wish I knew how it would feel to be free / I wish I could break all the chains that hold me / I wish I could do it all say what to say and I wish you could know / what it means to be me / then you would see and agree / that every man should be free, along with Simone’s art, it became another song that was important for the civil rights movement is.

“Backlash Blues”

This song, featured on the 1967 album Nina Simone Sings the Blues, comes from a protest poem written by Simone’s friend Langston Hughes. The music she wrote is more straight forward than many of her songs, but the lyrics include, “You give me second class houses / And second class schools / Do you think all colored people / Are just second class fools?” are moving and politically focused like many of their other songs.

I have bewitched you: the autobiography of Nina Simone

In Simone’s 1991 autobiography, made with Stephen Cleary, she writes: “Everything that happened to me as a child has to do with music.” She began piano lessons in her small North Carolina town, walked two miles and crossed the railroad tracks to study with her first piano teacher, Muriel Massinovitch. On her first piano recital at age eleven, her parents were removed from their front row seats and she refused to play until they were back in those seats and could see her hands as she played.

What happened, Miss Simone?

Liz Garbus’ documentary, which opened at Sundance in 2015, shows some of the diverse forms of Simone’s life, from studying as a concert pianist to playing in bars to touring the world, working in the civil rights movement and moving to Liberia in Switzerland and South France. Her longtime guitarist Al Schackman is interviewed along with her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly, executive producer of the film, and Lisa’s father Andrew Stroud.

Simone’s archive footage is stunning and her struggles, especially in the latter part of her life, are touched, sometimes to the point that they overshadow her incredible contributions to music, but it made me think of something in Anna Malaika Tubbs’ most recent book . The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.

In it, Tubbs writes about Malcolm X’s mother, Louise Little, who spent years in a mental hospital, and suggests part of the reason she was there because a black woman was trying to tell the truth. Attallah Shabbazz, daughter of Malcolm X and a friend of the family, says of Simone in the documentary: “She was not contradicting time, times were contradicting her.”

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