My voice is my passport – verify me

The World in Words

Remember the 1990’s flick Sneakers with Robert Redford? Robert Redford’s character leads a group of hackers on a mission to steal a decoder from the NSA. And there’s a part in the film when Redford needs to bypass security to sneak into a building. Only problem, the security is a voice activated; at least in 1992 that might’ve been a problem. Today, if José Sotelo has anything to do with it, Redford’s crew need not worry about imitating a voice.. Sotelo co-founded a start-up called Lyrebird that can synthesize your voice with as little as one minute of recording.

This week on the podcast: computers speak.

We talk about the original chat bot “ELIZA” who created as a therapy bot and , yes, was named after Eliza Doolittle. We look into the history of speech synthesis from brazen heads of the medieval times to the animated tones of the Voder, the electronic attempt to replicate speech. And best of all Patrick Cox has his voice synthesized.

Plus, we fret about the ethical implications of it all. How will this technology further erode our notion of truth? Are we entering a black mirror moment?