The Lyrebird team has pioneered text-to-voice technology, specifically with the creation of custom voices users can make based on their own voice, as well as recreation of existing people’s voices such as celebrities or politicians. The technology has obvious and beneficial applications in the fact that it can help people have a voice to use if for some reason they don’t/have lost the ability to speak themselves. Lyrebird in fact has a project dedicated to this very situation that they call “Project Revoice”. “Project Revoice is a non-profit initiative with the ultimate goal to ensure that no one living with ALS will ever have to suffer being robbed of their voice” (Projectrevoice.org). While projects like this clearly seem like a reason this technology will help society, there are ethical issues that can occur with it. The Lyrebird team themselves has an ethics page where they address how they use the technology but if in the wrong hands others may use this technology in a less innocent manner. The ability to copy voices, particularly of people in power is dangerous for obvious reasons. As covered in the article on risks of Lyrebird, conversations could be faked leading to conflict or other issues. At the same time real conversations that may be incriminating can simply be called fake by the people/person being accused.
