[Gustomaximus]

What makes you think it existed? I dont buy this assumption that military is 10+ years head on everything. They just dont have the budget, nor can they sequester everything of interest companies produce. Think Apple spends $10bn on R&D yearly and they've been averaging one distinctly new product every ~7 years + refinements. And while I dont doubt the military have some amazing/terrifying tech hidden it seems unrealistic is off to assume the military has that much commercial goods developed ahead of the private sector.

[nitrogen]

Growing up, the first thing my friends did when they got audio software on PC was edit recordings of people to make them sound stupid. It was basic swapping answers from different questions.

Years later, I edited dialog from a movie (for my own use) to shorten or rearrange sentences in a way that very few people can detect, to remove profanity from clips I wanted to show to people who can't handle it.

Also, AIUI Hollywood has been splicing dialog for decades in ADR. Star Trek TNG had an episode in which a vocal resynthesis device played a role, so the idea is old.

[TeMPOraL]

Because it's blindingly obvious this was within technological capability of mildly sophisticated people for the last 10+ years? It may not had an obvious business use, so that's why it's late to the market compared to image and video manipulation techniques. But it's not that people discovered signal processing last year.

[dingaling]

> Think Apple spends $10bn on R&D yearly

And the DoD's R&D budget for 2016 was $71.9 billion, plus whatever chunk of the classified intelligence budget of $80 billion went to R&D.

So roughly a magnitude more than Apple, each and every year.