This audio clip of a robot as Trump may prelude a future of fake … – Washington Post

What if you could make President Trump say whatever you wanted?Like this.

Or here he is again with his simulated frenemies, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

How about listening to thevaguely robot-like voice of yourself, programmed into an app based on a sample of your speech? The technology will be readysoon,according to ateam of researchers from the University of Montreals institute for computer-based learning algorithms.

Now theyre seeking investors for theirproduct,Lyrebird,and hopetojoinGoogle in the fast-expandingbusiness ofmimicking human voices.

Virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri have driven the voice technology into the mainstream, where we can controlourphones, cars and even refrigerators through verbal commands. And now we face a future where the perfect vocal replication of the president of the United States or you, or anyone could be just a few years away, some experts say. How does thatfuturesound?

Whoever wins the development race, experts in technology and ethical fields are gearing up for products that will do to voice what Photoshop did to photos make reality verydifficultto tell from a simulation.

Lyrebirdis aware of the downsides. Thetechnology isexciting with potentially dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and stealing the identity of someone else, according to an ethical disclaimer on Lyrebirds website. The developersdid not immediately respond to an interview request.

Nevertheless,the inventorsplan to begin selling what they call the first technology to allow copying voices in a matter of minutes with fine tuning for emotional control.

Scientific American notes that Lyrebird and a competing Alphabet-ownedproject called WaveNetuse neural network technology code patterned after neurons in thehuman brain to simulate human speech on the fly.

In contrast, existingvoice assistants such as Siri and Alexa work by cobbling together words and phrases from prerecorded files of one particular voice.

Lyrebird saysitstechnology, once released, will be able to mimic any voice based on as little as aminute of audio recording though one of the developers told TechCrunch that longer samples would reduce the distinctly metallic rasp that the outlet noted in clipsreleased so far.

[Burger King thought it had a great idea. Instead, it ended up with a Whopper of a problem.]

While Lyrebirds developers have not announced a release date for their product, they claimit will simulate audio much faster than Googles WaveNet.

When the tech giants artificial intelligence unit demonstrated WaveNetlast year, listeners rated it as the closest simulationyet of human speech, according to the Verge.

However, the outlet noted, Googles team had to manually tweakthe audiooutputor it sounded like AIbaby babble.

Timo Baumann, a speech processing researcher atCarnegie Mellon University, told Scientific American that Lyrebirds audio sounded a tad robotic but that convincing human simulations voice assistants that people might treat like friends were a few years away.

Five major tech giants: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.com arepursingwhat The Washington Posts Elizabeth Dwoskincalled an arms race to create the next generation of virtual assistants to make our personal devices converselike humans, if not also sound like them.

Its about taking the way that humans have naturally interacted with each other for thousands of years and applying that to the way they interact with services, Dag Kittlaus, a co-f0under of the Siri app now in every iPhone, told Dwoskin. Hewas working on a conversational artificial intelligence technology he hoped would replace it.

Theprospect of computer-simulated voice concerned a security technologist from Harvard University, who told Scientific Americanthat a new reality of fake audio clips was on the horizon.

A refined version of this system could replicate a persons voice with incredible accuracy, making it virtually impossible for a human listener to discern the original from the emulation, Gizmodo warned. The day is coming when vocal speech, like an image processed in Photoshop, can be manipulated without our knowing.

When Adobe demonstrated yet another form of voice-faking software last year one that rearranges words in pre-recorded audio clips a technology researcher at the University of Stirling expressed horror to the BBC.

It seems that Adobes programmers were swept along with the excitement of creating something as innovative as a voice manipulator, Eddy Borges Rey told the outlet, and ignored the ethical dilemmas brought up by its potential misuse.

[The next hot job in Silicon Valley is for poets]

The creators of Lyrebird said they want their technology to be used for good:Giving back the voice to people who lost it to sickness, being able to record yourself at different stages in your life and hearing your voice later on, one of Lyrbirds developers told Gizmodo.

The teamtold TechCruch it plansto makeits voice simulator available to anyone with an Internet connection with free samples for fake audio in a voice of ones choosing, and a fee-per-sentence thereafter.

We hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that copying the voice of someone else is possible, the developers wrote.

More reading:

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This audio clip of a robot as Trump may prelude a future of fake ... - Washington Post