Samsung Bixby will clone a user’s voice to answer phone calls

In short: There’s been loads of discuss AIs having the ability to completely imitate somebody’s voice and the potential risks that would carry, however Samsung desires to make use of the expertise in a much less nefarious means. The corporate’s Bixby Textual content Name characteristic, which converts textual content to speech for cellphone calls, is getting an replace, so the voice it makes use of is a precise copy of the person’s.

Bixby Textual content Name, a part of Samsung’s One UI 5.1, provides customers the choice of typing out a message as a substitute of answering an incoming cellphone name. Slightly than sending this message as a textual content, Bixby converts it to voice-generated audio, which it performs upon answering the decision.

The service makes use of a number of default voices for studying messages out aloud. However a new update makes use of a duplicate of your individual voice for these textual content replies. That is achieved by recording a number of sentences of your voice within the Bixby Voice Creator, which creates an AI-generated copy proper right down to the tone.

The Bixby Textual content Name characteristic is accessible now in English. The AI voice-generator is barely accessible in Korea in the intervening time, however it’s rolling out to English audio system with the Galaxy S23 sequence later this month. Samsung says it plans to make the generated voice appropriate with different Samsung apps “past cellphone calls.”

Imitating somebody’s voice is at all times going to lift fears about potential scams or different crimes ought to somebody steal the cellphone and acquire entry to it, however Samsung notes that the characteristic does inform callers that there are talking to Bixby and never the individual they rang.

It was solely final week that we heard of an Apple patent that would enable an iMessage to be read aloud within the sender’s personal voice. It sounds similar to what Samsung affords, although Apple’s model is expounded solely to its iMessage service.

We’re simply two months into 2023, and it already seems to be prefer it’ll be remembered because the 12 months AI went mainstream. One simply has to take a look at all of the tales about ChatGPT, voice-generating systems, and autonomous military vehicles for an thought of what the long run holds.