Mission Impossible Voice Duplicator Finally Exists, Machine Can Copy Anyone’s Voice

One of the most prominent sci-fi technologies on the movie franchise Mission Impossible is the voice duplicator and synthesizer that allowed Tom Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt to speak with another person’s voice for one reason or another. Technology in the real world has finally caught up with fiction with a machine that can do the same thing by just listening to one minute’s worth of audio.

This new tech comes via the Canadian company Lyrebird, which created the machine that trumps pretty much everything that has been revealed to the public, thus far. Adobe’s Project VoCo offers similar features, Futurism reports, but it required 20 minutes’ worth of audio file before it could duplicate the voice. This makes the newcomer twenty times more efficient, which can have alarming results.

What really makes Lyrebird’s machine so impressive and worrisome is the fact that it can distinguish voices in a noisy recording. It can even detect what emotions the speakers feel via inflections, which it can then duplicate.

Obviously, this raises some rather pointed questions of ethics. To its credit, the company actually voices these concerns and is even asking others to do the same.

“We hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that copying the voice of someone else is possible,” the company’s warnings reads. “More generally, we want to raise attention about the lack of evidence that audio recordings may represent in the near future.”

The Next Web brings up one of the biggest concerns when it comes to this kind of technology as well, which includes the possibility of using President Donald Trump’s voice to declare war on the US’ close neighbor, Canada. Considering the rising tensions between the two countries right now and the inherently unstable temperament of the current US president, such an eventually wouldn’t be much of a stretch in the minds of Americans.