Just ahead of the 2024 US elections, call screening and fraud detection company Hiya has launched a free Chrome extension to identify deepfake voices. Called Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector, the tool “listens” to voices playing in a video or audio stream and provides an authenticity score, telling you whether it’s real or fake.
Hiya told Engadget that third-party testers have found the extension to be over 99 percent accurate. The company says it also covers AI-generated voices that the detection model hasn’t trained on, and the company claims it can recognize voices created by new synthesis models as soon as it launches.
We played around with the extension ahead of launch, and it appears to work well. I watched a YouTube video about blues pioneer Howlin’ Wolf that I suspected used AI narration, and it gave it a 1/100 authenticity score, declaring it to be probably a deepfake. Suspicions confirmed.
Hiya took a well-earned dig at social media companies for making such tools a necessity. “It’s clear that social media sites have a huge responsibility to alert users when the content they’re consuming has a high likelihood of being an AI deepfake,” Hiya president Kush Parikh wrote in a press release.
“Currently the responsibility is on the individual to be alert to the risks and use tools like our Deepfake Voice Detector to check if they’re concerned content is being altered. This is a huge ask, so we’re pleased to support them with a solution that helps put some of the power back in their hands.” The extension only needs to listen to a few seconds of sound to produce results. It works on a credit system to prevent Hiya’s servers from being overwhelmed with excessive requests.
You’ll get 20 credits per day, which may or may not cover the flood of manipulated AI content you’ll encounter on social media in the coming weeks.
If you’re a Prime member, you can save $50 on the recently released Colorsoft Kindle, also known as the first Kindle with color. This is the first discount we’ve seen since this model launched.
We encountered a “yellow band” problem with our review unit, but we later received an updated reader for which Amazon made “reasonable adjustments” to resolve the issue. The software and display adjustments the company implemented worked — and we actually liked the overall effect better. Check out our review for the full story.