ID R&D Unveils AI Tool to Spot Voice Deepfakes

ID R&D has introduced a voice clone detection tool to combat AI-driven fraud.

The voice biometrics company announced the new offering Tuesday (Jan. 9), saying it was designed to detect voice clones and audio deepfakes and prevent fraud and crime.

“Just as deepfakes have made it harder to distinguish between fact and fiction in the digital world, voice clones make it hard to believe what we hear said by people we think we know and recognize,” Alexey Khitrov, ID R&D CEO, said in a news release.

“In a world where deepfake impersonations are proliferating so rapidly, voice clone detection plays an essential role in preserving trust between people and technology, securing the voice interface from fraud.”

According to the release, ID R&D software processes a recording of speech and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to conclude whether it was spoken by a person or a voice clone. Covert use of a voice clone, the release said, typically suggests criminal intent.

PYMNTS has been covering AI’s use as a way to commit and prevent fraud for much of the last year, writing last fall that generative AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have democratized access to sophisticated phishing and other behaviorally driven fraud methods, making them both more effective and convincing, but also easier to use on a larger scale.

“Utilizing generative AI, a fraudster can effectively mimic a voice within three seconds of having recorded data,” Karen Postma, managing vice president of risk analytics and fraud services at PSCU, told PYMNTS in October. “Everyone has an equal ability to deploy technology, no matter who they are.”

“Fraudsters are utilizing AI to not just commit attacks, but to become very good at committing these attacks,” she added, noting that traditional protections and red flags such as CVV mismatch were less effective as cybercriminals increasingly use AI for their attacks.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS explored a more positive use of AI voice clones this week in a conversation with Ofir Krakowski, CEO and co-founder at Deepdub.

His company specializes in localizing entertainment content and generating multilingual voice clones with AI. That means using the technology so that voice actors and celebrities can narrate a movie in various languages without sacrificing the nuances and tonal inflections that make their voices unique and recognizable.

“Sixty percent of the audiovisual content out there is in English, and around the world a lot of people don’t understand English. This means that 60% of the content globally is not accessible to most of the people around the world. … What we are doing [with Deepdub] is democratizing the content,” he said.