Adobe’s Project VoCo Could Be The ‘Photoshop’ For Audio

Adobe’s Photoshop is a tool used by many professionals in the photography and graphics editing industry. It lets users touch up photos as well as manipulate them by erasing certain objects, adding objects, merging photos, and so on. Now it looks like Adobe wants to be able to do the same for speeches by announcing Project VoCo.

At the moment Project VoCo exists as an experimental tool in which users can edit speeches, like removing certain words and replacing them with new ones. Users will also be able to create completely new recordings from scratch, meaning that if you have enough vocal information on someone, you could in theory create a speech in their voice and make them say something that they did not actually say in real life.

According to TechCrunch, “Project VoCo needs about 20 minutes of voice samples from a given speaker. It then analyzes the speech, breaks it down into phonemes, transcribes it and creates the voice model.” From a technical standpoint, this is very impressive, although from an ethical standpoint we have to wonder if such a software should ever be released to the masses.

As it stands hacking someone’s social media and posting something in their name can be convincing enough to cause panic, so imagine if you heard an audio recording of someone you recognize, that would be incredibly creepy! However the good news is that for now, Adobe has no plans to ship Project VoCo as a commercial product, but for all we know that could change in the future.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: adobe