Just in time for the 2024 US elections, call analysis and fraud detection company Hiya launched a free Chrome extension to detect deepfake voices. The named good Hello deepfake voice detector “listens” to voices played in video or audio sequences and assigns an authenticity score, telling you whether it is likely to be real or fake.
Hiya tells Engadget that third-party testers have validated the extension with greater than 99 percent accuracy. The company says this even covers ai-generated voices that the detection model hasn't been trained on, and claims it can detect voices created by new synthesis models as soon as they are released.
We tested the extension before launch and it seems to work well. I pulled up a YouTube video about blues pioneer Howlin' Wolf that I suspected of using ai narration and assigned it an authenticity score of 1/100, declaring it was probably a deepfake. Suspicions confirmed.
Hiya took a well-deserved swipe at social media companies for making such a tool necessary. “It is clear that social media sites have a huge responsibility to alert users when the content they are consuming has a high probability of being an ai deepfake,” Hiya president Kush Parikh wrote in a press release. . “Currently, the onus is on the individual to be aware of the risks and use tools like our Deepfake voice detector to check if they are concerned that content is being altered. “It's a big ask, so we're pleased to be able 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 a voice to output a result. It works with a credit system to prevent Hiya servers from being blocked by excessive requests. You'll earn 20 credits daily, which may or may not cover the avalanche of manipulative ai content you'll find on social media in the coming weeks.
