iNarrators.com - News that Matters

Pentagon's Voice "Morphing" Technology

Sunday, 09 September 2007

When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing
By William M. Arkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, Feb. 1, 1999

"Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.

At least the voice sounds amazingly like him.

But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

By taking just a 10-minute digital recording of Steiner's voice, scientist George Papcun is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the tape.

Steiner was hardly the first or last victim to be spoofed by Papcun's team members. To refine their method, they took various high quality recordings of generals and experimented with creating fake statements. One of the most memorable is Colin Powell stating "I am being treated well by my captors."

Whereas early voice morphing required cutting and pasting speech to put letters or words together to make a composite, Papcun's software developed at Los Alamos can far more accurately replicate the way one actually speaks. Eliminated are the robotic intonations.

WAPO article

Keep in mind that this story was from 1999. Over 8 years ago. In computerese terms, that's quite some time to work out the bugs and refine the voice spoofing technology.

Why some unscrupulous person, or government agency, could copy the voice of say.... say Bin Laden and present that to the world as the real thing.

Luckily for us, the American MSM is full of alert watchdogs that keep an unswerving eye on truth, justice and the American way.

Who? Well, that man of men at CNN, Wolf Blitzer for one. And that stalwart at FOX, Sean Hannity. With defenders of truth like Blitzer and Hannity on the job, we can be sure no fake news will be shown on American MSM..

Comments

Add New

RSS