Rendered speechless by deepfake speech

While casually watching a Hawaiian volcano erupt on YouTube, as you do, I detected something creepy about the narrator that I couldn’t quite identify. It sounded like an adult American male, but with something subtly wrong about his rhythm. I started noticing the same in other videos, and posted on Facebook to ask whether anyone else thought synthetic digital voices were being used: the consensus was “probably not”.

Then last month the MIT Technology Review) that said “deepfake voices had something of a lousy reputation for their use in scam calls and internet trickery. But their improving quality has since piqued the interest of a growing number of companies. Recent breakthroughs in deep learning have made it possible to replicate many of the subtleties of human speech.” You can now sample the voice of a human actor, or someone in your firm, then have a company rent you a synthesiser that speaks your PR materials so well as to be undetectable.