Deep Voice can clone human voice in under four seconds
SOFTWARE developed by Chinese technology giant Baidu can clone a human’s voice with under four seconds of training audio.
This has implications for both trust and security in a wide range of computing tasks.
Baidu has been working on Deep Voice for over a year, and had already managed to reproduce speaker identities with about half an hour of training data. With new developments, it has lowered that time to 3.7 seconds.
A believable, if low-quality, false voice can now be produced from a only single sentence of speech. Of course, more training leads to higher-quality results, especially if there is more than one sample to learn from.
Baidu has uploaded an array of system demos to G it hub, showing the capabilities of Deep Voice. These include voice cloning and various manipulations, such as changing the voice from male to female or British to American.
While the company writes that ‘Voice cloning is expected to have significant applications in the direction of personalisation in human-machine interfaces’, there are naturally concerns about identity theft.
Tom Harwood, CPO and co-founder at voice security solutions provider Aeriandi, said: “This technology is poised to transform personalisation in human-machine interfaces, but it raises serious concerns about voice biometric security systems. Soon, criminals will need just a few seconds of
Soon, criminals will need just a few seconds of someone’s voice to cheat a voice recognition security system - voice biometric authentication will be rendered useless. – Tom Harwood, CPO and co-founder at voice security solutions provider Aeriandi
someone’s voice to cheat a voice recognition security system - voice biometric authentication will be rendered useless.
“Organisations need to be thinking now about how they can implement new technologies to ensure they stay ahead of the curve.”