
Imitating people’s speech patterns precisely could bring trouble - augustocallejas
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21721128-you-took-words-right-out-my-mouth-imitating-peoples-speech-patterns
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jdee
I've done a lot of work fixing up holes in bank telephone services over the
years. I've got evidence of telephone banking customer service reps recording
customer's voices and manually piecing together fragments in order to defeat
biometric id systems and the like. I've also seen "what is the 3rd letter of
your secret word" type voice challenges being pieced together over time to
reveal the full secret word. It's inevitable that all these vectors will be
automated at some point.

~~~
eternalvision
"My voice is my passport. Verify me."

The flaw of this authentication mechanism was detailed in popular culture many
decades ago.

~~~
nickgrosvenor
One of the great underrated films of all time. Sneakers

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lisper
I suspect that one of the reasons people have trouble discriminating between
these synthetic voices and the real thing is that they have become accustomed
to hearing compression artifacts on phone calls, which sound very similar to
the stitching artifacts in synthesized voices. For someone like me who grew up
talking on analog phones, the synthetic voice sounds pretty obviously
synthetic.

~~~
wamatt
What evidence is there to suggest this will always be the case, in light of
continual improvements?

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closeparen
The cell carrier oligopoly companies are cheap, and would rather use their
scarce and immensely valuable resources (bandwidth) to provide new services
and open new revenue streams, not boost the quality of existing services which
pretty much everyone already pays for.

~~~
ghaff
And, as with many other things, the revealed preferences of many people is
that they don't care much about quality of the call relative to other things.

I was just having a conversation with someone earlier today about how the
average quality of most of the voice calls we make is far lower than it was
decades ago on Ma Bell landlines. Of course, calls are much cheaper now, we
have mobile phones, etc. Nonetheless...

Sprint's early on ads about hearing a pin drop on their fiberoptic network
seem really quaint today.

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literallycancer
I'm pretty sure no landlines from decades ago come even close to a decently
configured voice chat server using e.g. Opus.

~~~
ghaff
Which, even stipulating that is the case, is not what most people use. Instead
many phone conversations involve "Wait, are you still there" "Can you hear
me?" [Shouted] "What?" No, we've most assuredly given up universal quality for
convenience and lower prices.

We CAN provide high quality but we mostly don't want to make the tradeoffs to
do so.

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mirimir
OK, now both arbitrary audio/video can be synthesized from samples. So
anything remote or recorded can be fake. But hey, that's no worse than text.
As Raphael noted, key-based authentication will be needed. Implementation for
mass media would be tough, though. In some cases, you'd be limited to
authenticating the recorder.

~~~
kakarot
What do you think about the possibility of nonspoofable, imperceptible
"signatures" that constantly revolve like OTP, that one could play in the
background while they speak to you over the phone? Your device could possibly
transparently interpret these signals for you.

I think it's worth exploring and that there is business potential.

~~~
mirimir
There will be a need for something like that. But maybe it already exists. I'm
pretty clueless about smartphones.

~~~
kakarot
If it does exist, it is limited to military use afaik. I don't know of any
commercial or FOSS platform like that. I was thinking more like a small usb-
chargable chip that you carry around that could be used no matter what phone
you are from, or to record verifiable messages.

The hurdle is creating an algo that can derive all previous signals to verify
non-live recordings, but that can't derive the future signals without a
private key. I'm not sure what existing bodies of work there are in that
domain.

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zkms
It's weird how nobody so far has mentioned using this technology for __singing
__\-- given there already are singing voice synthesizers that have had
extremely significant cultural
impact:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid)

~~~
hatsunearu
The way Vocaloid voice banks are created is a highly sophisticated and guided
process that involves sampling every phoneme the engine supports at various
different pitches. Vocaloid is merely the engine that pieces together phonemes
and apply things like vibrato, intonation, and other modulation. Very
different tech.

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tyingq
Might be an interesting twist on the somewhat common fraud tactic on
submitting bogus invoices via email. Follow up the email with a convincing
urgent voice mail from the CEO. _" Jim, these guys are personal friends of
board member XYZ, can we get them paid ASAP?"_

~~~
lolc
I wonder how common illegal invoice fraud is, because most of these invoice
scams are not fraud, legally. They are angling for a contract without claiming
that one existed in the first place.

When you imitate someone else's voice to validate an invoice you're committing
fraud at the very least. Most invoice scammers wouldn't do that because they
want to stay on the legal even if scummy side of things.

~~~
tyingq
Hmm. An invoice is usually presented as net term billing for a service or
product already delivered.

~~~
lolc
There is the "art" of creating an offer that looks like an invoice. I thought
that was the most common type of scam.

I don't actually know what the ratio is between these scams and actual fraud
where a bogus invoice is sent.

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azinman2
This WILL be used with celebrates and politicians in a satirical way, and
it'll be awesome.

Side note: I've been wanting to do this with my own homebrew Alexa to create
"NeNe" (of housewives fame)... a sassier and way funnier assistant.

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aaron695
True.

But don't underestimate the amazing benefits that will come with it.

Education and Entertainment will be revolutionized. It will disrupt the world
in a huge way as well as create new cyberpunk criminal endeavors.

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daodedickinson
I was surprised this wasn't used to fake a bombshell recording of Trump or
Clinton in the last election. It's gonna happen more and more frequently.

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strathmeyer
Well I can see an article briefly then it disappears. 2017 we still can't get
web content, guess I should go back to gopher.

~~~
JorgeGT
It's because it tries to sell you a subscription but your ad blocker blocks
the ad, leaving the content blank. I disabled javascript on the domain and
then the article stays.

~~~
Markoff
strange, worked fine for me in chrome+ublock origin and ajavscript enabled,
though i loaded beta version of website automatically

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Raphael
We'll need Signal to beep after every sentence to indicate that it was signed
with the supposed person's key.

~~~
StavrosK
It already gives you an error message if the message couldn't be
authenticated. That's the whole point of Signal.

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anotheryou
TL;DR: impersonation scams

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SFJulie
It is weird no computer so called scientists know science.

Any detection system are characterized by the fact they will fail at detecting
true positive, and tag false negative as true.

That is the 101 of science, there is a COST for detection and failure.

Biometrics are based on detection hence they can fail according to their
sensitivity (false negative) and the cost of cheating (false positive). This
analysis vary with progress.

AI too are detection systems, they also fail and can be defeated, it is just a
question of balancing a cost/benefits analysis with a good budget. Hence
criminal organizations and governments will tend to be the firsts one to
exploit theses systems because they have larger budgets.

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Chai-T-Rex
>The volunteers recognised cloned speech as such only half the time (ie, no
better than chance).

That's incorrect. It's like saying that one lottery ticket has a 50% chance of
winning. If they're fooling people half the time, that's way better than
chance, since there are so many ways of screwing things up.

~~~
obastani
I think they are saying the volunteers performed no better than chance, i.e.,
volunteers are no better at guessing real vs. clone compared to randomly
guessing. It's a really good outcome for the clone.

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bitwize
My voice is my passport. Verify me.

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Markoff
just to save your time - tha app from Candyvoice is not available yet

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mrec
Seems to be paywalled.

~~~
jwilk
Archived copy:

[https://archive.fo/bxUaX](https://archive.fo/bxUaX)

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jcoffland
Doesn't all new technology bring some sort of trouble?

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thomastjeffery
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

I couldn't resist.

