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.
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