AI-generated deepfake voices can fool both smart assistants and humans with 5 seconds of training

Easily available software can imitate a person's voice with such accuracy that it can fool both humans and smart devices, according to a new report. Researchers at the University of Chicago's Security, Algorithms, Networking and Data (SAND) Lab tested deepfake voice synthesis programs available on the open-source developer community site Github to see if they could unlock voice-recognition security on Amazon's Alexa, WeChat and Microsoft Azure. One of the programs, known as SV2TTS, only needs five seconds' worth to make a passable imitation, according to its developers. Described as a'real-time voice cloning toolbox,' SV2TTS was able to trick Microsoft Azure about 30 percent of the time but got the best of both WeChat and Amazon Alexa almost two-thirds, or 63 percent, of the time. It was also able to fool human ears: 200 volunteers asked to identify the real voices from the deepfakes were tricked about half the time. The deepfake audio was more successful at faking women's voices and those of non-native English speakers, though, 'why that happened, we need to investigate further,' SAND Lab researcher Emily Wenger told New Scientist.