Free courses / Making Things With AI / Lesson 3
A voice that is not theirs
Seconds of audio is enough. Here is the one rule that still works.
Copying a voice used to need a long recording in a quiet room. Now it needs a few seconds, and it copes with background noise and a phone microphone. A voice note, a wedding speech, any video somebody posted with the sound on.
So a voice has stopped being evidence of who is speaking. That is worth saying plainly rather than reassuringly, because the scam built on it is already common: somebody you love, in trouble, right now, and a reason you must not hang up and ring anybody else.
Urgency and secrecy together are the tell, and they beat the audio every time, because they are in the shape of the request rather than in the sound. Nobody who genuinely needs your help is harmed by you ringing them back on the number you already have.
- A few seconds of anybody's voice is enough.
- Urgency plus secrecy is the tell. The audio is not.
- Ring back on the number you already have.
BEEP / THE MYTH-BUSTER
I have no voice of my own, which makes me impossible to clone and terrible company at parties.
Try it
Agree a daft family word with the people you would drop everything for. Do it today, while nothing is happening, because the point of it is that it already exists.
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