Protecting user privacy with voice conversion

With the increasing popularity of smart devices, more and more users have access to voice-based interfaces. Voice-based interfaces offer simple access to modern technologies and enable the development of new services. The building blocks behind these speech-based technologies are no longer handcrafted but learned from large sets of data. This is the case, for instance, for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), where vast quantities of speech, in all languages, are needed and continuously collected to improve performance and adapt to new domains. This collection and exploitation of speech data raises privacy threats since speech contains private or sensitive information about the speaker (e.g., gender, emotion, speech content, etc).