"My voice is my passport. Verify me."

I have to renew my passport every 10 years or so. How do I do that with my voice? I guess it's time to take some vocal lessons.

The fediverse take on that was "customers are advised to rotate their faces and birthdays."

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

Do you need to calibrate it to be able to repeat it, and does that calibration change if you are at a different altitude and in different conditions, such as humidity?

Does merely changing altitude (or ambient pressure) change voice enough to be considered different by a recognition or synthesizing system?

In reality, some phlegm aside, their voice is still the same in any way that matters.

If you knew people who didn't smoke and started (not uncommon in the 80s and 90s, quite a few people I know started smoking in university, or after the stress of a first job, some even later), and also the inverse, you can trivially hear it for yourself.

I guess you don't listen to Sinatra.

Although it does seem to affect some people more than others for sure, I guess it depends how and what you're smoking.

The ability to switch mid-sentence is mostly just something I discovered I can do and is fun. But the ability to pass as my real gender is something that helps me feel safe. And when needed, being able to occasionally pass as my prior gender (e.g., when calling my bank until I can change my name/gender legally), it also quite useful.

But pitch is far from the only thing that someone gendered one way or another in western culture (and presumably elsewhere). Resonance, weight, breathing patterns, word choice, and prosody all matter too. That's way too much to go into in a post here on HN, but the easiest one to understand is resonance or "size." Female-perceived speakers have higher resonance / smaller size. This means that some of the higher harmonics are amplified more than the lower harmonics, an it's called a "small size" because the actual resonating area from the larynx to the tongue is made smaller (mostly through tongue placement). Male-perceived speakers do the opposite, creating a larger space for resonance and resulting in a lowered resonance.

I know quite a few cis people who are also going through some of this training to help with their voice acting, or even just for fun.

There are a lot of good (and unfortunately some bad) resources online for trans voice training in both directions. My personal favorite (and where I started my lessons) is Seattle Voice Labs, but Online Vocal Coach / Vox Nova is also a great resource.

One thing I've been feeling itchy regarding this domain is that a lot of existing resources are shallow and there aren't many gamified options even though things like rhythm game feels like a perfect fit. I think not a negligible number of people, especially young and inexperienced, are struggling with aggressive or dis-satisfied sounding voices against their intent. Just a laptop app to feedback the error between their intended voice and recognized voices to let them minimize the error feel like a useful thing to me.

IMO, the best way to learn to control your voice is to learn to hear variations in size, weight, pitch, open quotient, prosody, etc. From there you can become your own coach so you're not focused on an app while having a real world conversation with someone. Would a gamified version help? Possibly.

(sorry for the delay, I have no idea if you'll see this. I wrote it last week but apparently never pressed the submit button??)

Here is a clip of him when someone called his studio thinking they were the local Pizza Hut. Phil does all the other voices, including the phone system.

https://share.google/QHNkgsOdvGj7tapfk

Well met, fellow Uplinker!!

I'm pretty sure this person worked at Playtronics.

Voice fingeprinting is essentially useless because it is easily recorded and reproduced.

Voices aren't strong.

There just aren't that many unique characteristic parameters behind a voice - it's largely dictated by an evolutionary shared shared larynx and vocal tract. They aren't fingerprints.

The fact that human voice impersonation is not only widely possible but popular should give you an indication of this. Prosody, intonation, range, etc. - it's all flexible and can be learned and duplicated.

The signals are simple too, because we have to encode and decode them quickly. You may or may not be able to picture and rotate an apple tree in your head, but you can easily read this sentence in the voice of David Attenborough.

Moreover, you can easily fine tune a voice model to fit any other speaker. You can store the unique speaker embeddings in a very thin layer. Zero and few shot unseen sampling can even come close to full reproduction. You can measure this all quantitatively.

Voices are not, and never have been, fingerprints. They're just not that unique.

The problem is that even if you know that, you still get bombarded by banking apps promising "biometrics are more secure than passwords, switch now!"

also this took me way too long to realize it had nothing to do with warhammer.

I feel like we're right on the threshold where we give up and start interacting with slop like it's human written.

I like to tell them this story that I read somewhere a decade or so ago. It might not be a true story (I never checked) but it's a helpful way of thinking about it.

Bob landed a great job and decided to celebrate by buying a new luxury car (a BMW in my recollection, but could be wrong) that had a thumbprint authentication for unlocking and for starting it, so you never have to carry external keys. One day a thief decided to steal Bob's car. They broke in to his house and tied him up. When they demanded the keys and he said there weren't any, they decided to cut off his thumb and use it as the key. Now Bob has no thumb and his car still got stolen.

I did find your story from 2005 about a man having his finger chopped off once the thieves realized they would need his appendage every time in order to start the car2.

https://news.sky.com/story/french-police-investigating-serie...

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18624943-600-finger-c...