Africa-Press – Sierra-Leone. A group of researchers at University College London (UCL) has found that people are experiencing more and more difficulty distinguishing between human and machine interlocutors when talking on the phone.
According to a recent study conducted by British scientists, it has become more difficult for people to determine whether it is a human or an artificial recording when conversing on the phone.
The group of researchers used a text-to-speech (TTS) algorithm which was trained on English and Mandarin datasets in order to synthesize 50 deepfake speech samples in each language.The scientists gave computer-generated and human samples to 529 participants for them to listen to in order to find out whether they would be able to distinguish between human and machine speech. It turned out that 27 percent of the time, the participants mistook an artificial sample for a human recording.
Moreover, special training offered by the research team for the participants proved surprisingly ineffective, as the detection rate saw only a slight upsurge. The rates for English and Mandarin speakers were almost identical, while the participants pointed out different aspects which helped them distinguish between the nature of the recordings. For English ones, paying attention to breathing was the most helpful, while Mandarin speakers looked at cadence, pacing, and fluency.
Although generative AI audio technology can be advantageous when dealing with life quality improvement for individuals with speech limitations, it could also be exploited by governments to influence citizens of other nations and criminals for malicious purposes, according to the scientists.
In response to the threats posed by deepfake technology, the research team decided to work on automated speech detectors.
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