Bot or not: exploring the fine line between cyber and human identity

Abstract

Speech technology is rapidly entering the everyday through the large scale commercial impact of systems such as Apple Siri and Amazon Echo. Meanwhile technology that allows voice cloning, voice modification, speech recognition, speech analytics and expressive speech synthesis has changed dramatically over recent years. The demonstration, described in this paper, is an educational tool in the form of an online quiz called `Bot or Not'. Using the quiz we have gathered impressions of what people realise is possible with current speech synthesis technology. The opinions of various groups regarding the synthesis of famous voices, sounding like a robot, and the difference between synthesis and voice modification were collected.