Business Blog
You Don’t Say: FTC workshop listens in on voice cloning
Imagine people who have lost the ability to speak communicating in a digital version of their own voice. With just a brief recorded snippet, researchers can use artificial intelligence and text-to-speech synthesis to create a near-perfect voice clone. But it takes even less time to imagine how fraudsters could use that technology to further their scams. On January 28, 2020, FTC staff will examine the consumer protection implications at You Don’t Say: An FTC Workshop on Voice Cloning.
Think of the typical family emergency scam where a con artist calls someone, pretending to be a relative in distress. Or consider its shady corporate cousin: the CEO scam. That’s when a crook, impersonating a company higher-up, calls an employee to transfer money for a purported business purpose. Those scams already steal millions from consumers each year. But what if the fraudster could use technology to clone the voice of a real person?
You Don’t Say will explore the many ways the technology can be positively used – healthcare, entertainment, and other consumer-oriented applications – and potentially abused. Panelists will consider ethical concerns related to the use of cloned voices and the impact on the trustworthiness of oral communications.
You Don’t Say will take place at the FTC’s Constitution Center conference facility, 400 7th Street, S.W., in Washington, DC. The event is free and open to the public. We’ll also webcast it live on January 28th beginning at 12:30 Eeastern Time. Follow the Business Blog and the You Don’t Say event page for agenda updates.
It is your choice whether to submit a comment. If you do, you must create a user name, or we will not post your comment. The Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes this information collection for purposes of managing online comments. Comments and user names are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) public records system, and user names also are part of the FTC’s computer user records system. We may routinely use these records as described in the FTC’s Privacy Act system notices. For more information on how the FTC handles information that we collect, please read our privacy policy.
The purpose of this blog and its comments section is to inform readers about Federal Trade Commission activity, and share information to help them avoid, report, and recover from fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are welcome, and we encourage comments. But keep in mind, this is a moderated blog. We review all comments before they are posted, and we won’t post comments that don’t comply with our commenting policy. We expect commenters to treat each other and the blog writers with respect.
We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above. The comments posted on this blog become part of the public domain. To protect your privacy and the privacy of other people, please do not include personal information. Opinions in comments that appear in this blog belong to the individuals who expressed them. They do not belong to or represent views of the Federal Trade Commission.