Eerie tech promises to copy anyone’s voice from just 1 minute of audio
Eerie tech promises to copy anyone’s voice from just 1
minute of audio
by ABHIMANYU GHOSHAL — April 24, 2017 in APPS
I’m not sure how I feel about the upcoming launch of
Montreal-based Lyrebird’s new service. The company says its API will let you
synthesize speech in anyone’s voice from just a minute-long recording – which
means you could, for instance, generate a clip of President Trump declaring war
on Canada.
Lyrebird has posted some audio examples that sound pretty
convincing (listen below, and find more on this page). The company says that it
doesn’t require the speaker to say the words that you’ll use the voice to speak
in the audio you generate, and it’ll also be able to create different
intonations.
If any of this sounds familiar, it might be because
you’re thinking of Adobe’s demo of its similar tech last November. But while
Adobe’s Project VoCo requires 20 minutes of audio and appears to use system
resources for speech synthesis, Lyrebird only needs a minute-long recording and
says it’s close to launching its cloud-based API to process audio and spit out
results.
As I wrote when we covered Project VoCo last year, it’s
likely that such software will lead to the creation and distribution of plenty
of misleading information that people might believe to be genuine.
On its Ethics page, Lyrebird says that its technology
“questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate
audio recordings.” It added:
By releasing our technology publicly and making it
available to anyone, we want to ensure that there will be no such risks. We
hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that
copying the voice of someone else is possible. More generally, we want to raise
attention about the lack of evidence that audio recordings may represent in the
near future.
Lyrebird might be on to something there: the widespread
availability of image manipulation tools has led to people questioning the
veracity of photographs that are circulated in the press and on the web, as
well as the integrity of their sources. But there’s still a huge risk of people
falling prey to scams and misinformation through tampered audio.
And we’re not just talking about copying the voices of
world leaders: people could be duped into handing over sensitive data when they
think they’re speaking with a significant other or a family member, and company
employees could find themselves following counter-productive orders from someone
on the phone who happens to sound an awful lot like their boss.
We’ve contacted Lyrebird to learn more and will update
this post if there’s a response.
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