Gone are the days of robotic spam calls. These days, scammers are using more sophisticated methods to trick people: Sounding just like you.
The Wall Street Journal recently did a deep dive on how artificial intelligence is making scamming people over the phone much easier.
Kimberly Hyun, assistant professor of marketing at UC's Lindner College of Business , offered insight on the persuasive power of AI-generated voices.
Hyun explained that hearing a voice that sounds like your own triggers perceptions of competence, morality and integrity. Your brain "immediately thinks that person is trustworthy, leading to compliance," she told the Wall Street Journal.
As a marketing professor and researcher, the power of persuasion is Hyun's specialty. Her latest study on vocal similarity concluded that a person's guard is lowered when speaking to someone that sounds familiar.
In the context of phone scams, that means that the closer the vocal quality to the person answering the phone, the more persuasive the scammer. Similarity can range from someone's unique timbre to factors like accents and regional dialects.
Read the full Wall Street Journal story (subscription required).
