Editing Digital sound-alikes

When it cannot be determined by human testing, is some synthesized recording a simulation of some person's speech, or is it a recording made of that person's actual real voice, it is a '''digital sound-alike'''.

Living people can defend¹ themselves against digital sound-alike by denying the things the digital sound-alike says if they are presented to the target, but dead people cannot. Digital sound-alikes offer criminals new disinformation attack vectors and wreak havoc on provability. 

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== Examples of speech synthesis software capable to make a digital sound-alikes ==
* [[w:Adobe Inc.]]'s [[w:Adobe Voco|Voco]] unreleased prototype publicly demonstrated in 2016. ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw&t=5s View and listen to Adobe MAX 2016 presentation of Voco)] 
* [[w:DeepMind]]'s [[w:WaveNet]] that was acquired by [[w:Google]] in 2014

Neither of these software are available to the masses at large according to the "official truth", but as is known software has a high tendency to get pirated very quickly.

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== Examples of speech synthesis software not quite able to fool a human yet ==
Some other contenders to create digital sound-alikes are though, as of 2019, their speech synthesis in most use scenarios does not yet fool a human because the results contain tell tale signs that give it away as a speech synthesizer.  

* [https://lyrebird.ai/ Lyrebird.ai] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxDBlZu__Xk (listen)] 
* [https://candyvoice.com/ CandyVoice.com] [https://candyvoice.com/demos/voice-conversion (test with your choice of text)] 

== Example of a digital sound-alike attack ==
A very simple example of a digital sound-alike attack is as follows: 

Someone puts a digital sound-alike to call somebody's voicemail from an unknown number and to speak for example illegal threats. In this example there are at least two victims:

# Victim #1 - The person whose voice has been stolen into a covert model and a digital sound-alike made from it to frame them for crimes
# Victim #2 - The person to whom the illegal threat is presented in a recorded form by a digital sound-alike that deceptively sounds like victim #1
# Victim #3 - It could also be viewed that victim #3 is our law enforcement systems as they are put to chase after and interrogate the innocent victim #1
# Victim #4 - Our judiciary which prosecutes and possibly convicts the innocent victim #1.

Thus it is high time to act and to '''[[Law proposals to ban covert modeling|criminalize the covert modeling of human appearance and voice]]!'''


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== See also in Ban Covert Modeling! wiki ==
* [[How to protect yourself from covert modeling]]
* [[Digital look-alikes]]

== See also in Wikipedia ==
* [[w:Speech synthesis]]
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Footnote 1. Whether a suspect can defend against faked synthetic speech that sounds like him/her depends on how up-to-date the judiciary is. If no information and instructions about digital sound-alikes have been given to the judiciary, they likely will not believe the defense of denying that the recording is of the suspect's voice.