How we think about
voice cloning.
Voice cloning has a reputation. Deepfake scams. Synthesized political audio. Estate-tech that resurrects dead loved ones in ways that make their actual loved ones uncomfortable. The technology is the same; the use case decides whether it's a gift or a violation.
Here's how Lovio handles it. Four commitments. We'll write to our waitlist first if any of them change.
- 1
You can only clone your own voice.
Voice samples are gated to the account creator's mic. You can't upload audio of someone else and have Lovio speak as them. We verify, technically and procedurally — voice enrollment requires a live recording session, not an upload, and we cross-check vocal signature against the account holder's prior samples.
Why this matters: the rest of the AI-voice industry is racing to remove this guardrail. Audiobook startups, podcast tools, and 'AI voice cloning for marketers' SaaS all let you upload arbitrary audio. We chose to make Lovio the version of this you can hand your kids — that requires giving up the use cases that scare people.
- 2
Recipients consent at delivery.
A capsule doesn't auto-play in someone's ear. They get an envelope with your name, a date, and a hint of what's inside. They open it when they're ready. They can choose not to. The capsule remains theirs to revisit, share with their own household, or delete — those decisions don't round-trip to the sender.
Why this matters: surprise audio from a loved one carries weight, especially when the moment doesn't match what the sender imagined. Delivery is a hand-off, not an interruption. The recipient gets to choose the moment.
- 3
No post-mortem surprises.
If the sender passes away mid-cycle, we don't auto-deliver pending capsules without explicit, signed-in-advance consent. The sender chooses at capsule creation whether their queued capsules should survive their death and continue delivering, OR whether they should be canceled. The default is cancel — opting in is a deliberate act.
Why this matters: grief is hard enough without unexpected voicemails from people who can't hear you back. We will not be the product that traumatizes a recipient who didn't know capsules were waiting.
- 4
Your voice samples stay yours.
We don't license, train, or share your voice samples. They're held by us only as long as you have an account. You can ask for hard deletion at any time and get it within 30 days, voice-clone artifacts included. If we're ever acquired, the acquirer inherits the same commitments — that's a baked-in covenant on every voice sample we hold, not a privacy-policy footnote.
Why this matters: AI voice training data is the single most valuable asset in the broader audio-ML ecosystem right now. We could increase the company's enterprise value by 10× by selling access. We won't, because the customer signed up for a private channel from themselves to people they love. That promise is the product.
What happens if these change.
Policies evolve as edge cases emerge. If any of the four commitments above shift, we'll write to the waitlist + every Lovio user via email before we change the policy — not after, not in a quiet update to the terms of service. You get the chance to delete your data and walk away without having to scan our footer for a notice we hid there.
What we will never do.
- Allow uploads of someone else's voice for cloning.
- Sell or license your voice samples to anyone for any purpose.
- Use your voice samples to train a general-purpose AI voice model.
- Deliver a capsule against the recipient's wishes once they've declined.
- Auto-deliver queued capsules after a sender's death without their prior opt-in.
We're building Lovio carefully because the thing it does — voice cloning — gets done badly elsewhere. We want this to be the version of it you'd be comfortable handing your kids.
— Sandon Jurowski, founder