The ability to feign another’s identity with voice is easier than ever with new audio tools and increased reliance on call centers that offer service (as opposed to going to the bank and talking to a teller, say). By pretending to be someone else on the phone, a voice fraudster can call a bank, brokerage, or insurer and access private information. “We’ve built ethical safeguards into our company from the ground up, from how we distribute our technology, to how we select the voice skins to offer, to watermarking our audio for detection in sensitive systems.”īut voice fraud is on the rise, which means the better technologists get at masking actual voices, the better fraudsters will get at deception. “Modulate is about creativity and freedom, not impersonating others,” co-founder Carter Huffman has said in a statement about the software.
The message for female gamers then becomes that they have to pretend to be guys if they want to fit in.
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A woman who chooses a male character and voice simply because she wishes to be free from harassment may have an easier time, but it still leaves the underlying societal problem intact. But they’d also help reenforce a problematic social environment in which being female is deemed inferior. Female gamers already mask their identity to avoid harassment by avoiding verbal communication with other players, according to a 2018 study of 270 women players in the Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. Women, for example, tend to be harassed more than male players, so this tool might help more women feel safe in these online communities.
The whole point of play is to engage in an alternate reality, and the more realistic this fantasy world seems, the more fun it might be.īut of course gamers don’t leave the real world behind when they play online. It’s the obvious next step in making gaming feel as real as possible. The more voices that are inputted into the software, the better it gets at learning, and the more authentic the modulated voices will be (for now, the samples on the Modulate website still sound synthetic). The machine “learns” how a user is speaking and modulates between the target voice they chose and the real voice they use.
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Modulate uses a type of machine learning technique called generative adversarial deep neural networks (GAN), along with conventional audio processing techniques, to “teach” the software how to speak in a realistic voice. In February, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company called Modulate, raised $2 million in seed financing to create audio skins that gamers can use to customize the voices of their avatars. Now, voice technology is catching up to more advanced visual tools. The new feature is incredibly popular, and seems to be driving Snapchat downloads, which may be a reflection of just how much fun people think it is to experiment with an alternate self. The social media platform Snapchat, for example, recently added a new gender-changing filter, which works better for men aiming to look like women than the reverse. The option to try being someone else is increasingly available beyond gaming, too. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” As Oscar Wilde put it in 1891, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Untethered to our physical selves, free from our names and the possibility of injury to reputation, we can say and do things we might not otherwise because the societal consequences are eliminated. They took him seriously, which only fueled the boy’s passion for online debate and made him more fully engaged in the ideology (until he met these friends in real life).įor many, anonymity frees us from accountability.
It can also be dangerous, as one Jewish mother discovered when her 13-year-old son became the moderator for an alt-right subreddit filled with hate speech: Users had no clue he was a Jewish kid from a liberal family experimenting with rebellion. We choose avatars that can allow us to boldly go where our own real life persona would not and that’s proved positive for some people who find a voice online. These are questions that the internet has allowed people to explore like never before.