Just in time for the 2024 US election, call verification and fraud detection company Hiya launched a free Chrome extension to spot deep fake votes. Aptly named Hiya Deepfake Sound Detector It “listens” to sounds played in video or audio streams and assigns an authenticity score, indicating whether it is real or fake.
Hiya tells Engadget that third-party testers have confirmed the extension with more than 99 percent accuracy. The company says it even covers AI-generated sounds that the detection model doesn’t train, and the company claims it can detect sounds created by new synthesis models as soon as they’re launched.
We played with the extension before launch and it seems to work well. I made a YouTube video about blues pioneer Howlin’ Wolf that I suspected was using AI narration, and he gave it a 1/100 authenticity score and declared it deeply fake. Suspicions confirmed.
Hiya took a well-earned hit on social media companies by making such a tool necessary. “It’s clear that social media sites have a huge responsibility to alert users when the content they consume has a high chance of being ‘deepfaked’ by artificial intelligence,” Hiya president Kush Parikh wrote in a press release. “The onus is now on the individual to be alert to the risks and use tools like Deepfake Voice Detector to check if they are concerned about content being tampered with. It’s a big ask, so we’re happy to support them with a solution that helps put some of the power back in their hands.”
The extension only needs to listen to the sound for a few seconds to get the result. Hiya is working on a credit system to prevent its servers from being overwhelmed by excessive requests. You will receive 20 credits daily, which may or may not include flooding manipulative AI content you will meet on social media in the coming weeks.
