[ttraub]

Artificial voices must have improved a lot in the past 2-3 years. None of the ones I've ever heard would pass muster. Something weird in their intonation, a kind of sameness or monotony in their speech i.e. lack of excitability, a bit too perfect and precise.

I just went to cereproc, one of these companies advertising a very realistic synthetic voice, and none of their voices convinced me at all, though I have to admit it was pretty good.

When they get so good that they are indistinguishable except through Turing tests, and maybe not even then, we'll all be in trouble. I somehow expect that we haven't yet reached that point, though it can't be long in coming.

[bufferoverflow]

You should really listen to the modern WaveNet samples.

I can't distinguish most of them from human, even knowing ahead of time which one is which:

English: https://r9y9.github.io/wavenet_vocoder/

English: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adapt...

Japanese: https://r9y9.github.io/demos/projects/icassp2020/

[JulianMorrison]

You can probably avoid the uncanny valley by a "bad phone connection" filter.

[weaksauce]

the sound quality on cell phones is really poor for me so i could see this being an easy thing to trick someone with on that. have you ever gotten a phone call from someone on a bad connection?

[malux85]

You read the article right? It literally happened. It’s already good enough to fool people who aren’t paying attention.

[unfunco]

> "Analysts told the WSJ that they believe that artificial intelligence- (AI)-based software was used to create a convincing imitation of the German CEO’s voice…"

> "If this turns out to indeed be a deepfake audio scam…"

It didn't literally happen, they _think_ that's what happened. I'm sceptical personally, I didn't realise deep fake audio could be done in realtime now? And who is this CEO that must have hundreds of hours of publicly available audio that the voice could be trained on?

[armagon]

Take a look at this article that hit HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21525878