13
votes
I got a spam call and the automated voice that requests their reasoning for calling was my voice AI generated
Link information
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- Title
- My Call Screening is Now Using My Recreated Voice as the Automated Voice
- Authors
- Terrormisu4u
The reddit post is 5 months old, only got 7 upvotes, is super sparse on details, and OP got -3 on their only reply. Any reason in particular you posted this, @Moonchild? Because I, for one, am incredibly skeptical of their claims. It feels like an attempt at modern creepypasta.
FWIW I saw a similar thing circulating yesterday: https://social.translunar.academy/objects/7d333a1d-87c2-4a92-8501-5436356b1f9f
Again, seems like a whole bunch of people freaking out and speculating, but with no real evidence. I wish some of the people claiming it was using their voice would upload a recording of it so we could compare it to the ones posted here that are both the same. If they're all the same, then this is just a case of people not recognizing their own voices, and condemning Google for an AI voice merely sounding similar to what they imagine their own sounds like.
Agreed, just figured that may be where this stuff is bubbling up from at the moment
Several others in the thread reported the same thing; it could be an elaborate prank, but that seems doubtful (and, from a quick glance, the accounts that posted the corroborating comments don't seem obviously fake). I don't see the significance of the vote counts. Re age, somebody else linked this to me earlier today.
I don't necessarily think it's an orchestrated prank. But I think the second highest comment explains it if it's not:
Which lines up with one of the main reasons I am skeptical of this, because how many people know what they actually sound like, enough to instantly recognize their own voice being played back at them? Whenever I've heard a recording of myself it sounds absolutely nothing like what I hear as I'm speaking. :P
That and voice models are reasonably demanding to train, and require lots of audio samples. And I very much doubt Google wants to waste that much computation time creating one for every individual user, especially at the risk of opening themselves up to potential lawsuits, or even wiretapping charges, by recording users phone calls without their express permission in order to get the samples required to train those models.
p.s. "I don't see the significance of the vote counts"... if it was happening to lots of people, or was even all that believable, it likely would have gotten far more than 7 votes. The fact that it didn't, and the OP got -3 on their only reply, leads me to believe that (like me) other people are also incredibly skeptical of the claims.
Seconding this. I have the Pixel with call screening and it's switched to a much more human voice, but one that sounds nothing like me. I think it's just coincidence that it happens to sound like OP, and there's a comment at the bottom of that thread that has listened to two pixel screening voices from two phones and reported that they also do not sound like their owners.
My partner and I both have Pixel phones (since the first- and second-gen Pixels, respectively) and the Call Screening voice is identical on both of our phones (despite us having very distinctly different voices).
The voice was likely trained on a large dataset of men, resulting in a voice that is pretty representative of the average American male's voice.
I'm betting that the people who think that the call screening voice is mimicking their own just have a generic male voice with no strong regional accent.
Side note: I tried to record the audio transcript of a recent call screening via the built-in screen recording function but, no matter what I did, it wouldn't actually record the audio. It must be treating the audio payback the same as phone call audio, which it doesn't let you record by default.
I'm not sure if there's a way around this, or if any call recording apps would be able to capture it, but being able to capture the audio natively would be ideal for making sure there is clean audio for comparison.
I checked and there's a Share button next to screened calls that exports a WAV of the call audio. The original filename started with "dobby_audio_", I wonder if that's the name of this call screening system.
Wow... so obvious that it was almost physically painful to see I somehow missed that, lol.
And your call screen voice sounds identical to mine.