Deepfakes use AI to impose one person's face onto another, making it hard to see that it is fake. Imagine adding this type of AI trickery to a voice? Imagine then combining it with a deepfake to essentially create a fake version of someone. Well, voice cloning is happening and Samsung today announced an AI feature for Bixby that will mimic a user's voice.
Bixby is the company's virtual assistant. It now has an AI feature (Bixby Custom Voice Creator) that allows it to clone a voice and will answer phone calls for the user. So, if someone calls and you cannot answer with your voice, you can type a response and Bixby will read it by copying your voice.
Samsung says the feature is making its debut in Korean and that Bixby Custom Voice Creator is only available for the new Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, and the Galaxy S23 Ultra. It is worth noting that Samsung devices already allow users to answer calls by text through Bixby Text Call. However, this adds another layer by actually responding with your fake voice.
Because this is limited to Korea, it is unclear how good the AI is at matching to someone's voice. Even so, it is clear this technology is here to stay and will get better over time. Like all things in the AI space, it could become very dangerous is mis-used.
VALL-E
I recently reported on Microsoft's VALL-E AI. Currently in development, VALL-E is essentially an AI synthesis tool that aims to remove the uncanny valley from AI speech while also being able to mimic human speech. Microsoft used 60,000 hours of English speech information to train the AI and is now showing the results in a research paper in collaboration with Cornell University.
AI is getting better at talking and getting better at cloning speech. It is easy to see how this technology will integrate with natural language processing AI such as ChatGPT or Microsoft's new Bing Chat. We may not be that far away from these services delivering responses in human-like speech.
In fact, one Microsoft developer has already shown how ChatGPT can be integrated with a talking chatbot and the results are quite staggering.
Tip of the day: Windows Update downloads can often be frustrating because they are several gigabytes in size and can slow down your internet connection. That means your device may work with reduced performance while the update is downloading. In our guide, we show you how to limit bandwidth for Windows Update downloads, so they won't bother you again.
