How to tell if a voice recording is AI-generated
Scientific American · Shafik Quoraishee ·
I can clone my voice in seconds—but there are tricks to help tell real speech from AI
I’ve long been intrigued by the technology needed to virtually clone my own voice. Just three years ago this effort involved multiple hours of recorded speech and a host of specialized tools to create a quick quote that sounded even remotely like me. Now I can do it with just a few seconds of audio and a couple of clicks—and it takes an expert to recognize that it’s fake.
Why would I do this? I have a background in acoustic analysis, and as the technology has advanced, I’ve been curious to test it and track any tells that reveal the clone as a fake. So last week I again cloned my voice, this time using a free, open-source tool. If that sounds easy, it’s because it is, says Sarah Barrington, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies artificial intelligence voice cloning. At most, a cloning service might ask the user to affirm their right to copy a voice.
“There are platforms online that will advertise as few as three seconds’ worth of someone’s voice to create a clone,” Barrington says. Voice cloning, she explains, went, “kind of overnight, from quite technical to immediately consumer-accessible.” In a demonstration in her lectures, for example, Barrington clones her own voice from a YouTube clip in a mere 90 seconds.
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