What you hear may not be what (or who) you think it is.
I ran an experiment on some friends, and the results were not quite what I expected.
The question was simple: “Is this me?”
The answer, as the clickbait headlines might say, will surprise you.
Trusting your ears
New voice tools can duplicate how someone sounds using just a few minutes of audio. This means a voice you trust on the phone might not be real. Stay alert, and don’t believe a voice just because it sounds familiar.
First, the test
If you watch the video accompanying this article (see below) or have watched any of my videos or listened to me on any podcast, you’ll have a sense of what I sound like.
Now, listen to this.
My question to you is simple: Is that me? More realistically, if you didn’t realize that audio was part of an article entitled “Don’t Trust Your Ears”, would you think it was me or not?
It’s not. I never spoke those words; it’s generated audio. All I did was copy/paste the text of the first sentence of this section into a speech synthesis service provided by llElevenLabs, and “I” started speaking.
It’s pretty darned spooky.
Running a similar test on friends, the results were mixed. Some recognized the fake voice, and some did not.
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The next variation
Now listen to this.
Not only did I not speak that, but I also didn’t write it. I never said any of it.
That’s the result of asking Claude, “Please write 100 words on the importance of password managers in the style of Leo Notenboom”, and then pasting the resulting text1 into the voice-generation app.
Granted, this one’s a little easier to detect as fake. The audio cadence and intonation are slightly off in places. But this technology is only going to get better. Given the pace of improvement, I expect better results soon.2
It’s cheap and easy
The service costs a little, but aside from that, I only needed to upload five minutes of audio of me speaking.
That was all. I could have uploaded one of my podcast episodes or scraped the audio from one of my hundreds of YouTube videos. In this case, I uploaded the audio track from a recent video.
Oh, and I promised that I had the right to use this voice.
You can guess where this is going.
Anyone can do it to anyone
If you can collect five minutes of decent audio from someone talking, you’re done. You have their voice. If you’re willing to lie about having the right to use it,3 you can have that person say anything.
We’ve seen (or heard) this happen already to politicians and a few famous actors. Usually, it’s in the realm of video deepfakes, which remain somewhat easier to identify. For now.
However, audio could cause issues.
Some financial institutions use voice ID for authentication. The phrase “my voice is my password” is commonly used. A security researcher used the tool to synthesize his voice saying that phrase, and it worked. He was able to access his account using voice ID technology without having spoken the phrase.
Hopefully, banks will discontinue this technique quickly.
Do this
I don’t want to paint too bleak a picture here. There are some amazing uses for this technology. Consider Stephen Hawking speaking in his “real” voice rather than the old, stilted, computer-generated voice he used in his later years. Or consider Roger Ebert, the famous film critic, who lost his voice to cancer. At one point, Apple went to great lengths to create a text-to-speech model of his voice so his wife could hear him speak as she remembered him. Now those “great lengths” are more like a few minutes that anyone can take.
It really comes down to skepticism. “Recognizing” a voice may no longer be enough to know for certain who you’re talking to on a phone. Imagine a scammer running the “I’ve lost my passport and need money” scam, only this time using a synthesized copy of the victim’s grandchild’s voice.
Be skeptical. Be amazed — but as always, and as with so many things, be alert.
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Footnotes & References
1:
AI:
Password managers matter because remembering dozens of strong, unique passwords is not something our brains are built to do. When you reuse the same password everywhere, a breach at one site can unlock your accounts everywhere else. A password manager solves this by creating and remembering long, random passwords for you; you just need to remember one master password. Yes, trusting a program with your passwords can feel uncomfortable at first. But reputable password managers use strong encryption, and the security they add far outweighs the risk of reusing simple passwords everywhere. It’s one of the single most effective steps you can take to stay safe online.
2: For example, taking a static passport-style image, 11labs can also generate a video of “me” saying what I never said. To those who know me, it’s pretty clear it’s not me (at a minimum, real-me’s eyebrows are much more expressive), but if you didn’t know what to expect, it could pass.
3: I’m NOT suggesting you do this. I’m also not a lawyer, so the legalities are beyond me, but they seem scary and complex.
I could hear a lot of errors in inflection, but it still would have fooled me. It sounded like you doing an emotionless reading of the text which is believable. I had a few college professors whose monotone voices could have been flawlessly deep-faked.
This may spawn a new forensic science if it hasn’t already, especially in crimes that contain ransom. Audible books could be pirated easily too.
In that recording of “you” talking about password managers, the voice was believable but the inflections and monotone speaking didn’t sound right. It sounded like you were reading it without your normal emphasis on certain words.
It is interesting that someone’s voice can be so easily faked and made to sound so realistic.
I noticed that the inflections were off, but it sounded to me as if Leo were reading the text. Leo reads with more inflection, but many people read with a lack of inflection similar to Leo’s fake. This technology will improve over time, probably a short time, and the fakes will be indistinguishable from the real thing.
In politics, recordings have had impact. Now, or in the very near future, it will be possible to produce sound and video of anyone saying anything. Then, when a real recording of something embarrassing is revealed, the victim could say “AI fake!” and no one would believe it.
Truth is dead.
Scary and disturbing.