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Comment by aketchum | Hacker News Reader

I think that the "star trek" use case of a live translation is super exciting. I think that this also will force people to have pass phrases that they use to authenticate phone calls with. I normally downplay when people bring up everyone signing everything with a public/private key (impractical for normal users) but clearly there will be a need for authentication protocols as AI proliferates

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Coming to an android and iphone near you voice authentication. Audio streams have inaudible data produced by encrypting a mutually known but changeable token like the current time with your private key embedded in the stream for example in frequencies you can't hear. Your phone app queries the service with the time of call and the data received and if they are also a subscriber it is able to discern their identity with certainty.

If this feature is standardized and built in it could be paired with a token like a yubikey which is on users keychain and authenticated even if they were using someone else's phone.

All these details can be completely opaque to the user who just needs to see a blue check by calls made with a device verifiably logged in as name@provider and a red exclamation beside calls made with no info at all.

Think fake kidnapping scams, industrial espionage, recent attacks involved in pretending to be in HR to redirect corp transfers to attacker.

Just a little doubt is liable to blow up such scams.

In a fake kidnapping scheme, it doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch to say “I’ve been kidnapped, and they took my keys, so I don’t have my yubikey” or something along those lines.

A lot of these scams evaporate like a soap bubble when someone questions it. All it can take is calling the persons phone to verify that they aren't actually kidnapped.

> If this feature is standardized and built in it could be paired with a token like a yubikey which is on users keychain and authenticated even if they were using someone else's phone.

Remember the standard tech bait-and-switch: if this feature is built in, it'll not be good enough to function for purposes you describe, but it will be good enough to track you by your voice for advertising purposes.

How "live" can translation ever really be? Properly translating anything from one language to another requires context.

While I’m not necessarily in favor of this, a multimodal AI that has access to your location, vision inputs, etc could obtain much of this context. People already explore foreign countries by hobbling together these services.

Human translators do it in approximately real-time, see for example the United Nations. At most you might need to wait for the end of the sentence to translate if e.g. the verb/object ordering is different.

like... a pin?

In the US some phone companies have been using voice recognition to authenticate when their customers call. This will definitely have to see its end.

HMRC in the UK also use it. Has never worked once for me and I don't even have any kind of accent.

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