When your voice runs away from home

Your daughter, on vacation, calls you in a state of panic to let you know that she and her friend are having trouble with a payment. Please can you send some money to her friend so they can pay for the hotel room. What do you do? Your safest option is to hang up and call your daughter back. It may sound exactly like Sophie but that doesn't mean it is.

Fraud with the use of cloned voices is becoming more common. Phone calls where people are conned out of their money has been going on for decades, but the novelty today is that the voice at the other end can be a voice you know. Perhaps even a voice you share a home with.

My podcast colleague James and I have been joking about the existence of many hundreds of hours of sound material with our voices after more than a decade of shows and talks published online. Our voices can be made to say anything. I've let my family know the dilemma of this.

Your voice is also at risk

The truth is that your voice can be just as vulnerable today. The new tools only need a recorded minute of your voice to generate a believable copy. Sixty seconds. Actually Microsoft say they can do it in three. And then your voice can be made to say anything.

Anyone thinking their voice is at least not recorded to any useful extent is likely oblivious to all phone calls recorded for "educational purposes", all video meetings where you may be asking questions, parties where people are constantly filming, or all the omnipresent microphones always in our vicinity that can often be activated remotely. It's almost hard not to mistakenly record yourself from time-to-time.

What can happen?

Last week many outlets reported about Jennifer who received a phone call from a kidnapper where her daughter first said "Mom, I messed up..." and then, while the kidnapper was stating his demands, sobbed in the background, "Mom, please help me".

The undertaking failed when a separate phone call revealed her daughter was safe and sound with a friend. But Jennifer was convinced her daughter was with the supposed kidnapper throughout that fraudulent call.

In Australia voices are used to verify identity with banks and with the tax authority. It's been shown that voice clones can be used to trick the systems into giving account access. Thankfully a pin code is also often needed, which can help in stopping a large portion of these attemps.

But think about the times you've been asked to verify a subscription or contract through a recording of your voice. Your voice. That you assume no one else has.

A chat channel on Telegram lets you order swatting services that make use of voice clones. It's a phenomenon wherein criminals trick emergency services to send police or emergency response teams to someone's address. In the latest episode of Cyber we can hear about it being used to send response teams to schools where computer-generated voices claim to have placed explosives.

How will you know if the next crime or swindle will involve your voice, or the voice of someone close to you? Can your voice even be claimed to belong to you anymore?

Of course good uses exist

Already in 2007 I experimented with using a service known as ReadSpeaker to have my blog posts read aloud by an artificial voice. This allowed more people access to my articles and was of course positive for my website in terms of accessibility.

The modern voice clones provide a quality that lead to further accessibility improvements: the listening experience is more pleasing. And these voices can also be used to convert news and articles to podcast episodes, without any human having to utter a single word.

As I personally read many of my blog posts for podcast publishing I could in theory automate this task. So far I'm somewhat skeptical towards going down...