Can you guess what I look like just from hearing the sound of my voice?
[MUSIC] Well, you can probably and for a few things and narrow it down.
I'm probably male, not super young or super old,
but after that, do you have any guesses?
Do you know what my nose looks like or how big my lips are?
Researchers all over the world are working to teach artificial intelligence how to guess
these facial features and so much more
based of the voice print of just a few milliseconds.
So how good has it gotten?
What can be useful in the future,
and why are we even doing it?
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Now, listen to this clip and see if you can guess who the actor is.
I'm going to brighten the mood by telling a few jokes.
Try this one on for size.
I don't care for cheese.
I'm a curd margin.
If you're a fan of Brooklyn Nine-Nine,
you might have guessed it to be this man, Andre Brower.
But if you're a Speech2Face AI,
a neural network designed by researchers at MIT,
you'd have guessed this image.
Now, I know what you're thinking,
That looks absolutely nothing like Mr. Brower.
But Speech2Face to get some stuff, right?
He's a male, somewhat middle aged,
of a dark complexion,
and look at the shape of their noses,
the AI nailed this almost perfectly.
That's because our nose and the rest of the bones in our face really shape how we sound.
Sound begins in the vocal flaps.
Their length and width are the big reasons our voices are pitched higher or lower.
But then we have to push the sound out.
It rattles around in our chest cavity and
while a good deal of it escapes through our mouths,
the rest of our face also acts as a sort of megaphone for our voice.
It's why some singers feel vibrations in their cheek bones,
jaws, and you guessed it, their noses.
Because of this, the AI can tell with some accuracy
the shape of our nose just from hearing the sound of our voice.
But the AI doesn't just take facial features into your account.
It should also be of note that groups that emanate from
certain regions tend to have similar attributes.
It's one of the reasons why you can tell where
somebody is from just from looking at them.
It also means that you or in AI can guess with
pretty good certainty what ethnicity someone
is just from hearing the sound of their voice.
When it comes to voice biometrics,
it's not dependent on language.
We really are measuring the characteristics of your voice and how you speak.
Nuance took it a step further and created linguistic biometrics,
which is identifying you based on how you use vocabulary,
um, based on grammar, based on sentence structure.
Dialect recognition is used in many voice biometric systems.
Speech2Face AI did this with some success,
but it wasn't built to give you
a perfect representation of what a person's face would really look like.
Instead, it's trying to recover
a characteristic physical features that are correlated with the input speech,
which is a fancy way of saying that it's building these drawings
based on correlations between speech patterns and facial features.
Researchers fed over a million videos with
audio samples to an AI and let it draw the correlations.
Sometimes, it works really well,
other times, it works a little less well.
The problem with patterns is that AI ends up having to be kind of
stereotypical and that can lead to objectively wrong images.
Like a man with a higher pitched voice might be portrayed as
a woman or as an ethnicity that might not relate to the one he was born into,
which proves that there are some limitations when it comes to tech like this,
but there's still a lot that can be done with it.