How To Fool an Eavesdropping AI … With Another AI

Scientists at Columbia University in New York City think they've devised an AI that can effectively fool an eavesdropping automatic speech recognition system from transcribing your private conversation. So in the future, you may not have to worry that someone is using spyware to record your phone calls, or that your Alexa is listening in when it shouldn't be. Their Neural Voice Camouflage system prevents eavesdroppers from secretly transcribing your audio conversation by piggybacking a custom static-type noise over your speech. The noise is set to the same volume as normal background noise--no louder than a regular background air conditioning unit--so people you're talking to can still easily make out what you're saying. However, the automatic speech recognition system (ASR) that's attempting to eavesdrop will get confused and produce a Gobbledygook transcription, as you can see in the demonstration below: This process of producing a custom background noise is more complicated than it seems.