Is identifying people using their voice a good idea?
Date & Time: October 30, 2018 - h. 9:00
Location: Room A102, Via Sommarive 5 - Polo Ferrari 1 (Povo, TN)
Speaker
- Simon King, University of Edinburgh
Abstract
Machines can now identify individuals from their speech more reliably than human listeners. That makes voice authentication systems a very attractive and customer-friendly option: “your voice is your password”. But, at exactly the same time as this increasing deployment of voice authentication, advances in computer-generated speech have made it rather easy to attack these systems. In fact, in the earliest experiments, computer-generated speech was identified by voice authentication systems even more accurately than human speech!
Countermeasures against some attacks are now available, but it’s not yet clear who will win this arms race: the good guys or the bad guys?
Would you use your voice as your password?
About the speaker
Simon King is Professor of Speech Processing in the department of Linguistics at UEDIN, and director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR). He is has research interests in speech synthesis, speech recognition and signal processing, with around 200 refereed publications in these areas. A common theme in his research is the application of linguistic expertise to technological applications. He co-authored the Festival speech synthesis toolkit. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and has served on the IEEE Spoken Language Technical Committee, is an associate editor of Computer Speech and Language and a former associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Signal Processing, former secretary and treasurer of the ISCA Speech Synthesis Special Interest Group, and current coordinator of the annual Blizzard speech synthesis evaluation programme. He has extensive project management experience, including as Director of the FP7 STREPs EMIME and Simple4All (both rated ‘Excellent’ at final review) and many UK projects.
Contact Person: giulia.boato [at] unitn.it (Giulia Boato)