Scientists Warn of Vocal Terror

Posted on September 28, 2007

Scientists are warning that vocal terror may be a reality of the future as computers develop the ability to mimic human speech nearly perfectly. Scientists expect within 10-15 years computers will be near perfect mimics of human speech.

In the future, it may be possible to mimic someone's voice exactly after recording just one sentence.
Such technologies would pose a danger if it were not possible to verify who was speaking, researchers believe.
Scientists were predicting the future at the British Association (BA) Festival of Science in York.
Dr David Howard from the University of York said: "The reason things are changing is because no longer are we using an acoustic model proposed in the 1950s."

Once our voices can be "stolen" it will be difficult to distinguish between the person you know from someone who is using computer software to synthesize their voice. The technology could be used by pranksters to make some very disturbing prank phone calls. Terrorists could use the technology to create confusion by mimicing the voice of an important leader. The most likely outcome: spammers will probably find some way to spam us using the voices of our friends and loved ones.