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A comment on Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of your voice.

Re:Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of y... by dantiberian on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @05:50PM (#15187398)
While it's good that you have an ethics page: https://lyrebird.ai/ethics/, it only has two ethical guidelines:

* Spread awareness of this technology

* Your digital voice remains yours

I would feel a lot better about this if you also had explicit ethical boundaries, for example disallowing users impersonating someone else, e.g. Donald Trump, Barack Obama. "Your digital voice remains yours" sort of sounds like you won't use/share my digital voice with others, but doesn't directly address whether bad actors can maliciously impersonate someone who hasn't registered with Lyrebird.

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Re:Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of y... by jeffmould on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @05:54PM (#15187429)
To build on that a bit. My bank uses voice recognition as a security measure and to authenticate me when I call in. Throw a bad actor in the mix and that becomes a security issue.
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Re:Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of y... by gervase on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @08:04PM (#15188142)
Reminds me of the classic "My voice is my passport. Verify me." Hopefully that is not the only second-factor option they provide?
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Re:Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of y... by jeffmould on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @08:20PM (#15188220)
Ha! Luckily it opt-in/out and they do allow you to keep a pin/code word as a backup.
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Re:Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of y... by adbrebs on Thursday September 07, 2017 @01:57PM (#15194210)
This is a good point, it's true that we don't mention it explicitly in our ethics statement. But it is in our evaluation agreement:

> (v) create a false identity or otherwise impersonate a third party on or through the Services;

section 3.A: https://lyrebird.ai/terms/evaluation

Unfortunately this is something that we can not enforce automatically.

We ensure that people copy their own voice by asking them to read predefined sentences (we use speech recognition to check that the sentence is indeed corresponding to the text).

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