Val Kilmer lost his natural speaking voice after a 2014 tracheotomy and chemotherapy for throat cancer. When he returned as Iceman in the 2022 film Top Gun: Maverick, his lines were produced by an AI voice model that the London startup Sonantic built from archival recordings of him. The partnership was announced in August 2021. Because Kilmer could not record fresh performances from a script the way most clients do, Sonantic developed new algorithms to wring a high-quality model out of the limited, imperfect source audio it had.
Kilmer was effusive about the result. “I’m grateful to the entire team at Sonantic who masterfully restored my voice in a way I’ve never imagined possible,” he said, adding that the loss of clear speech after his cancer had made it hard for others to understand him. Sonantic’s co-founder John Flynn framed the aim simply: “to make a voice model that Val would be proud of” and to give him a tool for future projects.
Shortly after the film’s release, Sonantic was acquired by Spotify, folding the voice technology into the streaming company’s plans.
Why business readers should care: Kilmer’s case is the sympathetic face of synthetic voice - a person who lost the ability to speak having it restored - shown alongside the darker uses of the same technology. It helped normalize AI voice recreation in mainstream film and previewed a market for personal voice models built from whatever recordings a person has left.