07/08/2017 Fake news, VoCo, Obama and Hillary Clinton...(CereProc on Radiolab)
CereProc has been working in speech synthesis and modification for many years and we are pleased to see this has started to become a more mainstream interest. Adobe, with their demo of VoCo highlighted the power and potential dangers of using speech synthesis to edit speech. Our CSO, Dr Matthew Aylett, was recently interviewed by Radiolab on how this technology could be used to create fake news. Listen to this thought provoking podcast here and see a bit of visual and audio modified Barack Obama here:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/breaking-news/
As RadioLab discovered, VoCo is not available yet, and the startling claims of being able to generate open content from only twenty minutes of speech are hard to verify. But, not wanting to miss a challenge CereProc thought we would take Adobe on with our own system. Except, rather than modify a voice from one of our own presenters we would use a voice from someone who we cannot get to record for us at all. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Now she has some spare time, we thought she might like to do the Adobe VoCo challenge.
The audio Adobe modified in the below clip is "I jumped out of the bed and I kissed my dogs, my husband, in that order."
So let’s start with this and alter wife to husband:
Now let's imagine Hillary is sending this audio to Bill, and wants to change the order somewhat:
However, in fact we know what really happened. The inspiration for the VoCo demo was inspired by an illicit kiss between Jordan Peel and the aspiring presidential candidate!