Comment by cubesnooper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cubesnooper | Hacker News Reader

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I would love to have a voice changer so I could put video streams online without fear of having my voice cloned: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/10/14/huge-...

Sure, I’m nowhere near a bank director on the list of “attractive targets for voice cloning,” but who knows how widespread this attack might become in the future, and by the time one’s voice is out there on the Net, there’s no way to take it back.

I would like to use a voice changer when making phone calls to businesses too. I can totally imagine future corporations creating a new revenue stream by selling models of a known person’s voice to advertisers so they can later correlate the voice to that person.

Unfortunate that Lyrebird’s transformations seem easy to reverse. I wonder if there are any FOSS tools that make it harder to recover the original voice.

My bank requests voiceprint verification. I personally think it's a terrible idea - I'm against all kinds of 2FA that involve phones or biometrics, and design my own systems to avoid them. I imagine deepfaked voiceprints might be a very lucrative target for thieves in the near future. In the current moment, voice verification is actually an incentive for kidnappers.

Your post gave me an interesting business concept. What if you could buy an anonymous, but totally unique voice, with its own speech patterns and pitches and everything, the way you can currently rent an anonymous email address? Each voice you buy could be generated as a downloadable data set, a one-time sale, subscriptions paid for updates to the software that interprets and reads it.

Unfortunately, a voice changer does not help with that. Human voice and speech is very complex. Just fiddling with some pitches is not enough to fully disguise all that.

Hmmm. I'm not sure that's true. I doubt modern voice-print analyzers are anywhere near sophisticated enough to be able to tease out timing and pronunciation if you've modified the sound beyond a simple pitch shift.

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