An Arizona family was terrified a few months ago when what they thought was a kidnapping and ransom call turned out to be a total scam created by artificial intelligence. As reports grow of scam calls that sound identical to loved ones, many fear that AI could be weaponized to threaten people with technology that's easy to access and only requires a small fee, several minutes and a stable internet connection. Jennifer DeStefano received an anonymous call one January afternoon while her 15-year-old daughter was out of town for a ski race. DeStefano heard her daughter answer the phone, panicking and screaming, quickly followed by a man's voice threatening to drug and kidnap DeStefano's daughter unless he was sent $1 million, CNN reported. DeStefano was able to reach her daughter a few minutes later, who was fine and puzzled about what had happened, because she hadn't been abducted and wasn't involved in the ransom call.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on course to become the next industrial revolution, impacting nearly every industry in one way or another. And that includes podcasting, where AI voice cloning technology is changing the landscape by offering content creators the ability to generate lifelike voices with ease. The cutting-edge innovation is expected to transform audio production, with AI-powered tools becoming increasingly popular among podcast hosts and producers. However, it is necessary to take a broad look at the production process using AI voice cloning, ethical concerns, and what the future of podcasting might hold as AI-generated voices become more difficult to distinguish. Just want to listen to a podcast?

A Canadian startup called Lyrebird has announced that it has developed a platform capable of mimicking human voice with a fraction of the audio samples required by other platforms such as Google DeepMind and Adobe Project VoCo. The Lyrebird synthesis software requires only 60 seconds of sample audio to produce it's synthetic sample. VoCo needs about 20 minutes to do the same. The quality of the voice reproductions that the software can make are mixed. Some are better than others.