Using artificial intelligence, scammers can duplicate someone's voice with just seconds of audio, says the University of Cincinnati's Kimberly Hyun . Imposter scams are one of the most common forms of fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission .
Hyun, assistant professor of marketing at UC's Carl H. Lindner College of Business , studies the role of voice in persuasion. In her own research, she uses machine learning to analyze voices with less than 10 seconds of audio.
"As voice recognition and cloning technology is getting more and more accessible, we were interested in seeing if a voice that's similar to our own voice sounds more persuasive," Hyun said.
That's why she spearheaded the study, "Vocal similarity, timbre and persuasion in consumer-spokesperson interactions." It was recently published in the Journal of Marketing Research .
She found that a consumer's guard is lowered when speaking to someone that sounds familiar. The closer the vocal quality to the consumer, the more persuasive the spokesperson. In other words, recognizable voices, ones that sound like people we know and trust — or even our own voice — are more likely to make us comply.
Hyun's team was specifically measuring timbre: The unique color of one's voice. Even with the same pitch, tone and volume, two voices can be distinguished through their timbre.
"Every voice is very different, just like how every face is very different. Just like how face ID works, we can identify people using their own voice," Hyun said.
The timbre is what gives each voice its own unique sound, like a fingerprint.
"Across analyses of sales pitches and in our experiments, we found that similar voices are more persuasive," Hyun said. "Even when someone has no other reason to think a speaker is more credible."
