Lyrebird steals your voice to make you say things you didn't – and we hate this future Hastening the arrival of a world in which simulation is indistinguishable from reality, startup Lyrebird has announced plans to power up an online service that can imitate a person's voice. Given roughly a minute of voice samples from a specific person, the upstart's system can, via an API, convert supplied text into spoken …
Yes - I hit the comment button to suggest that someone needs to point this out to the likes of HSBC.
https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/contact-and-support/banking-made-easy/voice-id
Then next time you call, no more passwords... you'll just need to repeat that short, simple phrase.Don't worry about remembering it - we'll tell
youwhoever wants to get into your account what to make their system say each time.
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Any bank offering this will become very quickly my ex-bank !!!
Voice recognition is not perfect so there will be some leaway for inventive people.
Also it will need to be able to handle if you have a cold or something that changes your voice in some way.
Too strict and it will not work most of the time, too lax and a good recording or mimic may get away with being accepted.
As usual if any money does go from your account the banks will claim it cannot be 'tricked' so the loss is not real and you are attempting fraud.
The Inland Revenue are trialling voice recognition as an "additional" security.
I put it off last time by making the most 'orrible distressed animal noises. Computer probably thought I was from the north east or Luvverpule and eventually gave up.
"Any bank offering this will become very quickly my ex-bank !!!"
Can I make the IR my ex IR?
"Just don't use that service."
Exactly, yes. I use HSBC, but this ridiculous offering won't affect me. It's a telephone banking thing, and I don't use telephone banking.
If they were make it compulsory for everyone to provide a voice sample, even if they don't use telephone banking, I'd be off like a shot - but dictionaries would have to define a whole new level of stupid to fit that in.
I had to phone HSBC when my old phone died in order to re-enable the security app on my new phone. At the end of the call they suggested I might want to try voice recognition for phone banking, despite the fact they'd spent the last 10 minutes struggling to understand me because I'd almost lost my voice completely with tonsillitis.
Funny (peculiar, not ha-ha) you should mention this. I recently called my credit card company (Citibank) to resolve a small matter, and the last thing the woman asked me was "we're using voice authentication now, would you like to authorize this on your account?". I thought about it, and replied "No." But it would have been a lot less thinking and a lot stronger "no", had I known about this.
Only just starting? Nuance has been selling the technology since the early 2000's. Even then the technology was able to analysis speech patterns, tone and inflexions and so effectively could provide continuous voice authentication of natural language interactions.
Bad enough that scammers try to get you recorded saying Yes to anything so they can splice it in as evidence of your confirmation on anything they want. Now they could easily go to someone's youtube video/rant, run it through, and basically own you for evidence when you dispute the fact that you did order 2 tons of creamed corn...
"Bad enough that scammers try to get you recorded saying Yes to anything so they can splice it in as evidence of your confirmation on anything they want."
Mains hum (edit: as mentioned by Number 6 below) and background noise are your friends here. I bought my new bathroom with court winnings shared with me by a friend who relied on my evidence (using Audacity) that the same "yes" had been reused multiple times in a faked recording of her agreeing to a contract.
But I'm not sure faking voices has ever been that hard, many people can quite effectively mimic other people: I'd be interested to now how reliable voiceprints were against talented impersonators.
For real forensic stuff, there is a team in the UK that records the low-level mains hum which is present on recordings made in the UK. It is apparently a pretty unique fingerprint in that if you claim a recording was made at a particular date and time, they can process it to see whether the hum is (a) continuous (i.e. not made up of spliced samples) and (b) matches the fluctuations for that date and time. I don't know if they can take a recording and tell you when it was made though, that sounds like a lot of computing power to correlate.
I seem to remember an item on TV that stated that they could effectively use the mains hum as a timestamp. They are recording the mains hum continuously and can match the hum on a recording with a timeframe. They demonstrated that they could prove that a recording was of the person claimed BUT was not taken at the time claimed.
i.e. Instructions given over the phone and automatically recorded as proof of an action had in fact been recorded after the event and had the timestamp changed on the digital recording.
@low level hum analysis to reveal voice synthesis
I can imagine the low level hum being difficult to forensically prove, not least because it'll be heavily filtered by narrow audio bandwidth of the call.
Will banks have to mandate that you watermark all your calls to them by using a phone app that plays a sound behind your voice? Don't forget, scammers can add such sounds and hum after processing the fake voice...
What possible GOOD could something like this do? I see lots of downside with this technology, but no real upside. Why do it?
I hope these clowns don't invent a simple way to (say) rebuild an old TV into a powerful bomb or make large quantities of poison gas from common groceries. They'd likely publish it to world+dog instantly.
This reminds me of the minor moral panic that happened when Photoshop first became popular. Apparently criminal types were going to get up to all sorts of shenanigans with this terrible new power. Instead, instead it just killed in popular consciousness the always stupid notion that the camera doesn't lie.
"What possible GOOD could something like this do? I see lots of downside with this technology, but no real upside. Why do it?"
Would you prefer people with these abilities kept it quiet and used it for personal (illicit) gain? Keeping quiet about this sort of capability when (some) banks are experimenting with voice recognition security would be immoral, in my opinion.
Recently on radio I heard about a woman who's losing her voice and she wants to have a close copy produced by machine if that's the best alternative. So that's an application.
In fact I lost my voice last week due to a severe cold, then realised it is quite difficult to get medical attention, especially in a remote consultation, without speaking. I don't know what people do in this situation’; I found an online text inquiry service, but it turns out that they charge quite a high fee, including for membership that isn't mentioned particularly prominently.
Very clever idea .... not !!!
A digital media technique looking for a misuse, yet again. :(
A Phishers/Whalers dream come true.
Current efforts targeting the CFO's of companies to transfer funds to 'new'/'changed' accounts on the say so of people pretending to be the CEO or their PA etc can now be more convincing by providing a Telephone confirmation from the CEO.
Just you wait it WILL happen one day.
First published October 1st 1981, Program for a puppet (Roland Perry), envisages a puppet US president and shadowy people using computer tools to fake voice recordings.
I don't remember it in Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" (1975 and had computer worms as well as Ritalin type drugging of most people.)
My main problem with that film is that it gives the impression that the drug completely surpresses all emotions etc. And I recall that because of that some bits of the plot didn't make much sense. But in some cast/crew chat they refined that to be that it mostly surpresses emotions etc. That made a lot more sense, but they didn't make it at all obvious in the film.
Program for a puppet (Roland Perry)
<googles> - Ah - not the Roland Perry who worked on Amstrad computers, but an Australian author.
"The deception isn't perfect. The voice samples provided sound processed and often the phrasing sounds off."
This is true, but if you go to the demo page from Lyrebird and scroll down, there are a set of clips of Donald Trump 'saying' "I am not a robot, my intonation is always different." Each time the computer makes the clip, it uses a different intonation, some of which sound wrong. Just make it ten times and use the best intonation, if you are trying to fool people.
Don't think so. You're tech may be able to fool Joe Public (not a really difficult task), but proper scientists will carve the inconsistencies and aberrations of your pathetic attempts to fool them before they've even finished their morning coffee.
I read somewhere (a good while ago) that scientists had determined that the human voice has some form of signal that can be recognized whether or not the person has a cold, is sick or not. I am quite sure that, if science is capable of determining that unique quality in a person's voice, no amount of computer trickery will be able to pass that check.
Wait and see, I guess.
You are off message with New Alternative Facts Reality.
No-one cares what "proper scientists" think. The public have had enough with experts. Truth is what is liked by one of your mates on facebook. Anecdotal opinion is every bit as good as years of verified research. Facts are boring, its the feels that matter. You may reject reality if it is inconvenient.
with the face manipulation program, and this is no difference: porn.
This has the added "benefit" that could be used also for erotic hotlines.
Would any famous person agree? most likely not (well, maybe someone; Kardashians anyone? - as if there was a need for that!).
But again, Internet is full of fake celebrities porn pictures (or so they I've been told).
"Don't go there!", I want to say in an awful imiatation of a terminator doing a perfect imitation of a mother's voice.
The first application would be software with call scamming voices
The second application will be software analyzing the abovementioned call scamming voice (pay extra to subscribe to a premium version in order to increase the accuracy from 89.75% to 91.43%
The third application will be software recognizing software analyzing the abovementioned call scamming voice (pay extra to not only recognize, but most importantly, DEFEAT such software, with our one-off daily service charge.
The fourth application will be... The third application, the third application will be the government, telling you in heavenly voices, that no matter what, you should not leave your home and join the evil-doers trying to overthrow the government.
The fifth application... never mind, truly, a wide range of applications, I'm sure they'll be snatched by a Do No Evil Corp or such once they manage to inflate their asking price enough.
Think of it: any celebrity you want whispering sweet nothings into your ears; talking dirty; playing out the most depraved and/or niche sexual fantasies you could possibly imagine. Want them to talk about you being a furry inflated blueberried baby they're about to eat? No problem!
This could get interesting very quickly.
People will tend to trust something they have been told is genuine, even when it's demonstrably compromised, or been shown to be total bollocks. So called Lie Detectors, for example, have no scientific validity, yet many people still think they work.
At the very least, (Insert politician/public figure of your choice here) can always claim they never said such a thing and that it was created by this simulator. It's been - in theory - possible to put together fake speeches by using tape editing and sampling but this tech makes it much more convenient.
BBC fools HSBC voice recognition security system
See this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39965545
Case proved re: my previous comment below about Banks :)
**Re: And some banks are starting to use**
=================================
Any bank offering this will become very quickly my ex-bank !!!
Voice recognition is not perfect so there will be some leaway for inventive people.
...
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