iPhones will be able to speak in your voice with 15 minutes of training

I think this is confusingly phrased in the press release too, so it's probably on Apple rather than the Verge.

> With Live Speech on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, users can type what they want to say to have it be spoken out loud during phone and FaceTime calls as well as in-person conversations. Users can also save commonly used phrases to chime in quickly during lively conversation with family, friends, and colleagues. Live Speech has been designed to support millions of people globally who are unable to speak or who have lost their speech over time.

It's clearer that it's for "at risk" users after, but I guess "millions of" was a marketing requirement.

> For users at risk of losing their ability to speak — such as those with a recent diagnosis of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or other conditions that can progressively impact speaking ability — Personal Voice is a simple and secure way to create a voice that sounds like them.

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/apple-previews-live-s...

Now you can steal someone's fingerprints, DNA, phone, and voice all at the same time. Efficiency!

What kind of banks do authorization by voice?

They already do that now. People are getting phished for their sms codes. As a side note, my local news just reported a big crime spree of people robbing cashless places. They have the manager log into the clover POS machines and issue refunds into their cards.

Criminals have been high tech for a while now

And enable fake ransom calls. What will we be able to trust?

This is alarmist at best. Does stealing someone's iPhone today mean that you've stolen their passwords and everything else? No. Why would this change?

Darth Vader now in „Return of the Jamba Spar-Abo“ (this only makes sense to Germans if at all;)

Darth Vader in TomTom was the best. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Oso7199WE

What exactly is an EU accent?

Between voice.ai and that audiobook John de Lancie and Majel Barrett recorded (Q-in-Law), I think it should be possible to run such a setup privately at least. Amazon would obviously need to get the copyright situation in order first.

Paired with projects like https://github.com/toverainc/willow I think you could recreate the Enterprise at home if you have enough IoT stuff in your home.

Verify me.

Ha! The article made me imagine a scene like this one in Sneakers, where over the course of dinner someone tricks their target into saying the complete set of training phrases for one of these iPhone voices. But then I realized that if the goal was to impersonate someone's voice, they'd probably just use a different voice model that was more flexible about its training data.

I'm more creeped out by that than anything. I understand that losing a loved one is difficult, but with something like this just seems to be one of those things that would make moving on much more difficult. Photos/videos of things that actually happened are one thing. Having an artificial computer voice that can lead one to think they are really speaking to someone is just creepy and I could see where someone with actual mental issues could get really confused.

I'm sure I listened to a scifi short story like this recently - but it was just text responses. Is a strange and interesting thought - I know that even listening to the voices of my children when they were little, can be really emotional feeling for me.

Having a deceased relative respond would be really odd, but could be soothing. What an odd world we live in now.

It's even better when a family member loses the ability to speak. Someone with a stroke may still be able to type words and this can help them deal with the frustration of not being heard.

With the dead person's agency no longer involved, even without malicious intent, any feelings or behaviour such a construct might generate in its users will be artificial and manipulative.

This type of AI would have the potential to become a true basilisk with poisonous breath and all.

Apple’s press release specifically notes that the training lines are randomized. You’d need to get 15 minutes of audio of the person saying the exact lines that the training asks for. Doesn’t seem like a huge risk.

15 minutes of randomized phrases. There are better tools for malicious voice cloning. Seems pretty safe. And Apple has put more tools into AirTags to prevent malicious uses than any other tracking devices. And to your last point, Apple is concerned, they are running it all on device and trying to make it as safe as possible while still being useful.