APPLE is looking to turn your voice into your very own Siri.
The tech giant has quietly filed a patent application for a new feature which would see iPhones read iMessages aloud in the owners voice.
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Apple would be the first tech company to do this, as long as the patent is approved.
While Apple fans can already ask Siri to read iMessages aloud for them, using the ‘Read my latest message from…’ command.
This is a whole new ball park.
“In response to receiving a message from a contact named ‘John,’ a user may desire to listen to the message in John’s voice, which enhances user experience while increasing efficiency of the device by eliminating the need for the user to read the received message,” Apple wrote in the patent.
iPhone owners would have to agree to share a voice file with all the data needed for the device to mimic their voice, according to Patently Apple.
The tech company added: “A voice model is obtained based on the plurality of speech inputs.
“A user input is received from the first user, the user input corresponding to a request to provide access to the voice model. The voice model is provided to a second electronic device.
“In some examples, a message is received from a respective user of a second electronic device. In response to receiving the message, a voice model of the respective user is received.
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“Based on the voice model, an audio output corresponding to the received message is provided.”
Under the proposed feature, when users send an iMessage, their phone would offer the option to attach a voice file.
The recipient would then be asked whether they want to receive the voice file as well as the message, which can be read in a simulation of their voice.
The feature is piggybacking off recent advancements made in artificial intelligence.
A new chatbot, similar to the wildly popular ChatGPT, is able to turn text into celebrity voices.
But the new technology, brought by NoiseGPT, has raised concerns over so-called ‘deepfakes’.
‘Deepfakes’ make visual and audio fabrications look and sound real.
It’s hard to navigate the internet without seeing them these days.
Some are intended to be funny, showing formal characters like politicians quoting lyrics from the Spice Girls.
But others can be created for malicious purposes, as they can be so hard to detect.
This is especially the case if the subject is not doing something completely out of character.
Apple is expected to be fielding some of this concern as it works on bringing this feature to life.
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