It used to be just a sci-fi nightmare scenario, but today, AI phishing is real, and it's costing companies millions. We've already touched upon this one, but the Hong Kong phishing scam that targeted an employee at Arup deserves a deeper dive. The employee was tricked by deepfake versions of her CFO and colleagues into transferring HK 200 million across 15 transactions. The case has been widely reported and confirmed by the Hong Kong police. Every face and voice was AI-generated.

We study the task of learning association between faces and voices, which is gaining interest in the multimodal community lately. These methods suffer from the deliberate crafting of negative mining procedures as well as the reliance on the distant margin parameter. These issues are addressed by learning a joint embedding space in which orthogonality constraints are applied to the fused embeddings of faces and voices. However, embedding spaces of faces and voices possess different characteristics and require spaces to be aligned before fusing them. To this end, we propose a method that accurately aligns the embedding spaces and fuses them with an enhanced gated fusion thereby improving the performance of face-voice association. Extensive experiments on the VoxCeleb dataset reveals the merits of the proposed approach.

Microsoft announced its latest contribution to the artificial intelligence race at its developer conference this week: software that can generate new avatars and voices or replicate the existing appearance and speech of a user – raising concerns that it could supercharge the creation of deepfakes, AI-made videos of events that didn't happen. Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2023, Azure AI Speech is trained with human images and allows users to input a script that can then be "read" aloud by a photorealistic avatar created with artificial intelligence. Users can either choose a preloaded Microsoft avatar or upload footage of a person whose voice and likeness they want to replicate. Microsoft said in a blog post published on Wednesday that the tool could be used to build "conversational agents, virtual assistants, chatbots and more". The post reads: "Customers can choose either a prebuilt or a custom neural voice for their avatar. If the same person's voice and likeness are used for both the custom neural voice and the custom text to speech avatar, the avatar will closely resemble that person."

Have you ever wished you could clone yourself? Imagine how much you could accomplish. The future of A.I. will make something kind of like that possible. By scanning your face and voice and observing how you talk and what you know, future A.I. could build a virtual assistant that's a virtual you. But one company is already working on it.

Promobot, a European artificial intelligence company, has offered someone £150,000 (over €175,000) to do just that. The company want to make their robots super realistic. So, they want to base their looks off real people, with the hope of making them more lifelike. You'd fit the role if you were over 25 and have a "kind and friendly" face. The job includes taking selfies and making a 3D model of a persons face and body to be replicated for the robot's physical features.

People tend to make snap judgments on each other in a single look and now an algorithm claims to have the same ability to determine trustworthiness for obtaining a loan in just two minutes. Tokyo-based DeepScore unveiled its facial and voice recognition app last week at the Consumer Electronics Show that is touted as a'next-generation scoring engine' for loan lenders, insurance companies and other financial institutions. While a customer answers 10 question, the AI analyzes their face and voice to calculate a'True Score' that can be help companies with the decision to deny or approve. DeepScore says its AI can determine lies with 70 percent accuracy and a 30 percent false negative rate, and will alert companies that fees need to be increased if dishonesty is detected. However, scientists raise concerns about bias saying the app is likely to discriminate against people with tics or anxiety, resulting in these individuals not receiving necessary funds or coverage, Motherboard reports.

AI at the edge pioneer Sensory has upgraded its face and voice biometric fusion platform with features to help device and app developers build products for life post-COVID-19, the company announced. Since face masks are now a general recommendation, many biometric facial recognition systems, such as those in smartphones, are no longer performing because they cannot identity a user if the face is half covered, the company points out. Since many functions require facial recognition to operate, TrulySecure now claims it can recognize users when wearing masks and detect coughs and sneezes, without jeopardizing security. Sensory's SDK combines face and voice biometrics to operate in difficult scenarios such as background noise or facial obstruction. The two complement each other to ensure high accuracy and a seamless, touchless user experience.

New in-car artificial intelligence (AI) technology could help prevent distracted and drowsy drivers from causing accidents. Affectiva Automotive AI analyses the faces and voices of drivers and passengers to understand their emotional and cognitive states. Its developer, AI software specialist Affectiva, says the technology can identify complex driver impairment states caused by drowsiness, physical distraction or mental distraction from cognitive load or anger, while current systems rely on simplistic head pose and eye gaze measurements. The solution allows for in-cabin tracking of all occupants simultaneously, measuring critical facial expressions and emotions such as joy, anger and surprise, as well as vocal expressions of anger, arousal and laughter. This data can be used by manufacturers and suppliers to feed into advanced driver monitoring and vehicle safety systems, and to provide differentiated in-car experiences.

SOURCE Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are two very hot buzzwords right now, and often seem to be used interchangeably. Printers that spit out three-dimensional human cells and even organs, including the heart and liver, may seem like science fiction. SOURCE For the first time, robots have successfully performed a tricky, delicate operation that helped implant a hearing device into a deaf woman's ear, according… Read More SOURCE Many disease outbreaks start from viruses found in animals – but viruses in animals are very difficult to study. SOURCE This world has seen four major revolutions that changed its entire face. SOURCE People are constantly trying to find more'human' ways to interact with technology.