Google's Translatotron 2 removes ability to deepfake voices

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. In 2019, Google released Translatotron, an AI system capable of directly translating a person's voice into another language. The system could create synthesized translations of voices to keep the sound of the original speaker's voice intact. But Translatotron could also be used to generate speech in a different voice, making it ripe for potential misuse in, for example, deepfakes. This week, researchers at Google quietly released a paper detailing Translatotron's successor, Translatotron 2, which solves the original issue with Translatotron by restricting the system to retain the source speaker's voice.