FTC Announces January Workshop to Examine Voice Cloning Technologies

The staff of the Federal Trade Commission will host a public workshop on January 28, 2020 to examine voice cloning technologies, which enable users to make near-perfect reproductions of a real person’s voice.

“You Don’t Say: An FTC Workshop on Voice Cloning Technologies” will examine both the benefits and potential misuses of voice cloning technologies. For example, voice cloning could be used to enable people who have lost the ability to speak to communicate using technology that simulates a cloned version of their own voice. These same technologies, however, could be misused by scammers to impersonate others.

The workshop will explore the following issues:

• Speech synthesis using the voice of an actual person;
• Development and use of voice cloning technologies, from healthcare and consumer-oriented applications (customer service, entertainment, etc.) to carrying out fraudulent schemes; and
• Ethical concerns related to the use of cloned voices.

The workshop, which is free and open to the public, will be held at the Constitution Center, 400 7th St., SW, Washington, D.C., and will be webcast live on the FTC’s website. The agenda, directions to the Constitution Center building, and a list of speakers will be available in the future on the event webpage.

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