Synthetic voice forgery in the forensic context: a short tutorial

Technical voice forgery in the forensic area has led to several studies, mainly dealing with voice conversion. In the last decade, latests developments around voice synthesis have reached satisfactory intelligibility and quality levels. Moreover, several web-based or standalone apps can be used for TTS. Nowadays, HMM-based synthetic voices can be built to fool biometric systems. Several authors reported FARs as high as 70 to 80% when TTS voices where used. Nevertheless, the forensic context is quite different since the human ear might be able to detect a synthetic voice, thus leading to a case discarding. We used the MARY TTS platform in order to produce a speaker-dependent synthetic target voice sample. Given a single synthetic trial, our very preliminary work is to show how feasible and successful such an attack is. Further work is needed to build other voices and provide accurate statistics. Our aim is to confirm a criminal opportunity and to show that synthetic voice detection might become mandatory in a near future.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Source Forensic Speech and Audio Analysis Working Group (ENFSI-FSAAWG)
Author Galou, Guillaume, Chollet, Gérard
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated November 12, 2026, 16:52 (UTC)
Created November 12, 2026, 16:52 (UTC)
Identifier hal-00625918
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information (LTCI) ; Télécom ParisTech-Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris] (IMT)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
coverage Rome, Italy
creator Galou, Guillaume
date 2011-11-12T00:00:00
harvest_object_id cbe04cff-e607-405c-8485-20dc4fb6b433
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2026-02-07T00:00:00
set_spec type:COMM