I am curious if these scammers are pre-recording conversations and playing them back in real-time or if they are actually able to speak using the cloned voice technology.
Yes, it has been so for years. The attack to the Dubai Bank in Hong Kong was effected in January 2020.
"Though users at the Audio Fakes Discord and the DeepFaceLab Discord are intensely interested in combining the two technologies into a single video+voice live deepfake architecture, no such product has publicly emerged as yet."
I am not aware of what was used in that occasion; there is also a good chance that the scammers could hack a system internally - the stake is stellar.
Surely, to convince the other part during a phone call a high degree of capability for interaction is required; from the same article, right above your quote:
> we can reasonably assume that the speaker is using a live, real-time deepfake framework
The quoted article is from late 2021. In these current days, we are seeing denounces according to which
> Voice scams are on the rise in a dramatic way. They were the second most common con trick in America last year, and they’re headed for the top spot this year (ex Voice scams: a great reason to be fearful of AI at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35459261 )
In operation in the video's it seems to work pretty well. :(