I was watching Vaa Vaathiyar which has a short clip of MGR speaking. It’s either AI-generated or mimic-ed and it wasn’t bad.
I used ffmpeg to record the audio from the film, transcribed it via Gemini 3 Pro on AI Studio with the prompt:
Transcribe this into Tamil
… which gave me:
ராமு… என்ன செய்திருக்கிறாய் நீ… வாத்தியார் கேட்கிறேன் சொல் நிமிர்ந்து பார்க்க கூட தைரியம் இல்லையா… ஓடாதே… நில்…
Translation:
Ramu… What have you done… Vaathiyar (MGR) is asking, tell me Don’t you have the courage to stand up and look at me… Don’t run… stop…
(GitHub Copilot’s auto-complete translated the above for me as I typed - flawlessly. It’s getting better by the day!)
Then, I used yt-dlp to download the audio from this MGR Short Clip.
Here’s the sample:
I fed this into ElevenLabs’ Instant Voice Clone that needs just 10 seconds of audio and created an “MGR” voice.
Here’s the same dialogue in the cloned voice:
Personally, I think the ElevenLabs version is slightly better. Of course, given the pace of AI improvement, this might just be the impact of a new model release.