The Toronto-based research arm of life sciences technology firm Klick Health has found a way to analyze voices in a manner that’s so granular, it can tell whether it’s a person or an artificial intelligence-powered machine.
But Yan Fossat, Klick Labs’ senior vice-president of digital health research and development, is hopeful his company can help make the world of AI a bit safer. “In ’Terminator,' they use dogs to smell if the people look like humans and in ‘Blade Runner,’ there’s the Voight-Kampff machine and I've always wanted to make a Voight-Kampff machine,” said Fossat, referencing a fictional test used in the film to measure physiological responses, such as eye motion and reaction time, to determine whether a character was a human or replicant.
For example, if someone has just dashed up a flight of stairs, they breathe faster, which can be heard in their voice. Voice can also indicate when someone is just waking or feeling tired. So far, Klick Labs’ method of identifying deepfakes has an 80 per cent success rate, but it might not last long. Sixteen other studies on vocal biomarkers and diseases that Klick Labs is conducting could also aid its research.