For Penguin Books, Wunderman Thompson Hong Kong asked us to use AI to help revive the voice of Ernest Hemingway, one of the most influential authors in American literature.

Recreating Hemingway’s voice

To make that happen, we needed voice recordings of Hemingway. But since he lived in the first half of the last century, the audio available was limited and not in great shape.

Working around this, we trained our AI to learn and enhance Hemingway’s voice, keeping only some of that old, crackly charm to transport us back to his time.

The Old Man and the Sea: A multilingual retelling

Now that our AI voice model is able to speak like Hemingway, we had him “read” The Old Man and the Sea – his last major work published during his lifetime that won him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and a Nobel Prize in Literature.

We used an original narration in both English and Mandarin Chinese and applied Hemingway’s voice to it. The outcome: a blend of the rhythm and dynamics from the input reading, combined with a vocal quality that is distinctively Hemingway’s, shining through in both languages.

Breathing new life into a literary legacy

With this, Ernest Hemingway can now reconnect with readers around the world in a way that was once unimaginable. His words, in his very own voice, even in languages he never spoke. And just like that, Hemingway’s voice lives on – both literally and literarily.