Is it possible to recover sound of the original voice after it has been changed by a voice changer?

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k1ng 1337

Joined Sep 11, 2020
940
And for those that think abuse in chat rooms is not a thing, I can testify it is. Many young people are unable to tell if someone is their friend or using them for sport. I have witnessed several accounts where a user on a gaming forum was severally impersonated by another with the only apparent intent of making the user look ridiculous and it worked. The thing worthy of note each time was the user gave the bully all the ammunition he needed. I have seen similar things done on this site as well with the quotation system even among users many years my senior. @TS, I believe understanding the psychological dynamics at work on the internet will help ease your mind. Take care.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,079
@nsaspook If I use voice encryption, I doubt many people on YouTube & Twitch will understand what I'm saying. So there is no effective way to change voice which might prevent others from recovering the original voice.
You need samples of the original voice usually. It's like changing your walk, if you know exactly what gait recognition systems are looking for it's easier but not fool-proof.

A deep accent change does work. I'm from Texas so it's easy for me to totally revert to a heavy birthplace accent and voice in an instant when I want to.
 

Audioguru again

Joined Oct 21, 2019
6,671
The lady from India on NCTV has a strong accent. The accent is mostly from Britain when she said "killer" it sounded like "killah". The people in Britain never pronounce the letter "R". "Water" sounds like "wotah" and the voice level fades away at the end of every sentence, maybe of running out of breath.
Every weekend I watch the Formula One car race on TV. The announcers are British and they say "racing cah and fahstest cah" over and over.

I am from Canada where we speak every letter (Killer sounds like killer and Water sounds like water) and we sound the same from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. People in Quebec speak mostly French so they have a strong accent when speaking English.

The "Voice Changer" is too simple to produce accents.
 

xox

Joined Sep 8, 2017
838
You could always talk differently using a made up voice. It occurred to me long ago having an alternative voice and appearance could save my life one day in an emergency situation if my known identity was targeted. I got the idea from Rush Hour where the main character says "Sorry, I am from out of town".


I don't intend to defraud anyone but I have practiced several voices and tones mostly from a comical perspective. I could pass as a German or the like with very poor English. I have been defrauded myself in the past so I value being prepared towards those who see an easy target. I don't really see this as a problem though, more of a what-if consideration.

Is all that even necessary though? You can only get scammed if you go along it, after all. I just tell them straight out, "Sorry this seems like a scam." (You'd be surprised how often they hang up right away.)

In other words, just be up-front and honest about it. Because one thing scammers are relying on is FLOW. As long as the conversation is strictly pleasantries and professional banter, they will have the upper-hand because they know you will be more apt to fulfill their requests. When you get straight to the point it just cuts through all of the BS in one fell swoop. It also psychologically reinforces your own confidence, which acts as a feedback loop of sorts.

But hey, whatever makes you feel most comfortable. I once heard an older friend of mine (who is apparently on a lot of mailing lists) answering a scam call in the following way. The caller asked for him by name, but he simply responded that the person had unfortunately passed away, and that he was the brother and in the process of making funeral arrangements. He then went on to try to pull the scammer into a lengthy conversation, things like "Is there anything you would like to share about my brother? I know you two were very close." and the like. I really had to suppress my laughter! Afterward he explained that it gave him a lot of pleasure to waste a scammers time.. :)
 

k1ng 1337

Joined Sep 11, 2020
940
Is all that even necessary though? You can only get scammed if you go along it, after all. I just tell them straight out, "Sorry this seems like a scam." (You'd be surprised how often they hang up right away.)

In other words, just be up-front and honest about it. Because one thing scammers are relying on is FLOW. As long as the conversation is strictly pleasantries and professional banter, they will have the upper-hand because they know you will be more apt to fulfill their requests. When you get straight to the point it just cuts through all of the BS in one fell swoop. It also psychologically reinforces your own confidence, which acts as a feedback loop of sorts.

But hey, whatever makes you feel most comfortable. I once heard an older friend of mine (who is apparently on a lot of mailing lists) answering a scam call in the following way. The caller asked for him by name, but he simply responded that the person had unfortunately passed away, and that he was the brother and in the process of making funeral arrangements. He then went on to try to pull the scammer into a lengthy conversation, things like "Is there anything you would like to share about my brother? I know you two were very close." and the like. I really had to suppress my laughter! Afterward he explained that it gave him a lot of pleasure to waste a scammers time.. :)
As my daddy used to say, don't reveal more information than you have to. Heeding this wisdom could have saved me a lot of trouble in my younger days. If you make up a story, then you already misrepresented yourself which may be an offence. After all, are you absolutely sure they are trying to defraud you in the first place? We are approaching an age where our identities are entirely digital if they are not already. Being proactive by at least taking an inventory of what you have to lose in these kinds of situations is vital. For me, I don't have much to lose and consider myself an unlikely target. The reality is some hacker may see this message and initiate their attacks because I admitted this complacent vulnerability. No one thinks it will happen to them and it's in this kind of criteria people fall (complacency). I believe it takes intelligence and skill to be a conman which is to say I see them as "worthy adversaries", not just some person with a bad accent trying cheap tricks. They are out there, and they are spending hours and days ironing out the details of their scam. I think it's a good idea to spend a few hours of my own learning how to combat this strategically.
 
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xox

Joined Sep 8, 2017
838
As my daddy used to say, don't reveal more information than you have to. If you make up a story, then you already misrepresented yourself which may be an offence. After all, are you absolutely sure they are trying to defraud you in the first place? We are approaching an age where our identities are entirely digital if they are not already. Being proactive by at least taking an inventory of what you have to lose in these kinds of situations is vital. For me, I don't have much to lose and consider myself an unlikely target. The reality is some hacker may see this message and initiate their attacks because I admitted this complacent vulnerability. No one thinks it will happen to them and it's in this kind of criteria people fall (complacency). I believe it takes intelligence and skill to be a conman which is to say I see them as "worthy adversaries", not just some person with a bad accent trying cheap tricks. They are out there, and they are spending hours and days ironing out the details of their scam.

Well of course, the world is filled with con-men. I take that as a given. But seeing through cons is not as hard as you might think. It just takes a little wisdom, and yes, some experience.

Heck, I remember lending my bicycle to a total stranger when I was maybe ten or eleven. I believed the kid's shtick that his mother was ill or some such. Then stood there like an idiot for a couple of hours until I finally accepted that I'd been had. That's how you learn.

But to get all paranoid about it? No thanks. I would rather enjoy life and try to find the good in others. But if one day some master-of-social-engineering con artist actually does succeed, well I'll learn from that one too. Fool me once, but ya ain't gonna fool me twice!
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,976
Some of the callers are selling medicare, others want to lower my credit card interest rate, Some want to sell me an extended auto warranty. And often I get hangup calls. What is needed is a way to prevent caller ID spoofing.
Most of the hang-up calls are from autodialers for scam marketers. In order to maximize the amount of time that their marketers are talking to someone, they use an autodialer to constantly dial phone numbers. When someone answers, the line is connected to a marketer. But if no marketer is available, it times out and hangs up. They don't care about inconveniencing or annoying potential customers, because the first thing they are do with the people that they get connected to is start trying to deceive them.
 

k1ng 1337

Joined Sep 11, 2020
940
Well of course, the world is filled with con-men. I take that as a given. But seeing through cons is not as hard as you might think. It just takes a little wisdom, and yes, some experience.

Heck, I remember lending my bicycle to a total stranger when I was maybe ten or eleven. I believed the kid's shtick that his mother was ill or some such. Then stood there like an idiot for a couple of hours until I finally accepted that I'd been had. That's how you learn.

But to get all paranoid about it? No thanks. I would rather enjoy life and try to find the good in others. But if one day some master-of-social-engineering con artist actually does succeed, well I'll learn from that one too. Fool me once, but ya ain't gonna fool me twice!
I admit I am prone to some paranoia. A lot of it is warranted from experience. Consider religious con artists for a moment, they fool millions of people and are still getting away with it. I want to know why and the answer is in their tactics. If you are to say to me, "don't worry about it you will worry yourself sick!" I appreciate that. I also wonder how many times my complacency has landed me in a rough situation that could have been easily prevented with this so called wisdom we speak of :p
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,976
Is all that even necessary though? You can only get scammed if you go along it, after all. I just tell them straight out, "Sorry this seems like a scam." (You'd be surprised how often they hang up right away.)

In other words, just be up-front and honest about it. Because one thing scammers are relying on is FLOW. As long as the conversation is strictly pleasantries and professional banter, they will have the upper-hand because they know you will be more apt to fulfill their requests. When you get straight to the point it just cuts through all of the BS in one fell swoop. It also psychologically reinforces your own confidence, which acts as a feedback loop of sorts.

But hey, whatever makes you feel most comfortable. I once heard an older friend of mine (who is apparently on a lot of mailing lists) answering a scam call in the following way. The caller asked for him by name, but he simply responded that the person had unfortunately passed away, and that he was the brother and in the process of making funeral arrangements. He then went on to try to pull the scammer into a lengthy conversation, things like "Is there anything you would like to share about my brother? I know you two were very close." and the like. I really had to suppress my laughter! Afterward he explained that it gave him a lot of pleasure to waste a scammers time.. :)
Back when I was a grad student (early 90s) and just before the National No Call List (and, before it, the Colorado No Call List) came about, I was getting ten to twenty calls every evening from marketers. For a while, my objective was to see how long I could keep them on the phone before THEY hung up (my record was forty-five minutes). My thinking was that since I couldn't stop them from calling, the best I could do was to raise their costs by reducing the productivity of their callers and/or making their callers' lives so miserable they they quit and the increased turnover would raise their cost of doing business. The hope was that if enough people did that, they would decide that they had to at least vet their call lists better. No indication that it ever had any effect, but I got some cheap entertainment out of it.

Part of me may have also been hoping that I would get another date out of it, too. Back in June 1985 I got what was nominally an obscene phone call. It turned out to be someone that was just so bored with her telemarketing job that when she asked for my stepmom by her maiden name and butchered it so badly that I didn't recognize it, she decided to turn it into a prank call and I chose to play along. That unnerved her so much that she hung up, but then called back about fifteen minutes later and was so bothered by it that she felt she had to apologize. But then she was scared that I knew who she was and when I pointed out that she had called me, she goes, "Oh. Right," and hung up. A couple hours later she had calmed down enough that when she called back to again apologize, we had a nice conversation and I ended up with her name and phone number. Unfortunately, I had to report for basic training the next day, but we stayed in touch and we went out twice when I was home on leave. She was an extremely nice gal (and an amateur fashion model). Sadly, we both knew that a long-distance relationship that was just starting out wasn't the way to go. I hope she found happiness.
 

xox

Joined Sep 8, 2017
838
I admit I am prone to some paranoia. A lot of it is warranted from experience. Consider religious con artists for a moment, they fool millions of people and are still getting away with it. I want to know why and the answer is in their tactics. If you are to say to me, "don't worry about it you will worry yourself sick!" I appreciate that. I also wonder how many times my complacency has landed me in a rough situation that could have been easily prevented with this so called wisdom we speak of :p
Well of course, you don't want to be complacent either. That goes for ANY dangerous situations, for that matter. Reminds me of this one time, several years ago, I was walking out of a restaurant with some friends and this guy just walks right up to us and suddenly tries to whip out a small pistol. Too bad for him, because within a split second I had already disarmed him and had him in a hand lock, and was actually able to hold him there until police arrived. Everyone else in the group had simply frozen in fear. Not me! But only because I know full well that complacency can cost people their lives. So yes, you should indeed be proactive about certain things. Just don't let it drive you crazy in the process. Balance... ;)

Back when I was a grad student (early 90s) and just before the National No Call List (and, before it, the Colorado No Call List) came about, I was getting ten to twenty calls every evening from marketers. For a while, my objective was to see how long I could keep them on the phone before THEY hung up (my record was forty-five minutes). My thinking was that since I couldn't stop them from calling, the best I could do was to raise their costs by reducing the productivity of their callers and/or making their callers' lives so miserable they they quit and the increased turnover would raise their cost of doing business. The hope was that if enough people did that, they would decide that they had to at least vet their call lists better. No indication that it ever had any effect, but I got some cheap entertainment out of it.

Part of me may have also been hoping that I would get another date out of it, too. Back in June 1985 I got what was nominally an obscene phone call. It turned out to be someone that was just so bored with her telemarketing job that when she asked for my stepmom by her maiden name and butchered it so badly that I didn't recognize it, she decided to turn it into a prank call and I chose to play along. That unnerved her so much that she hung up, but then called back about fifteen minutes later and was so bothered by it that she felt she had to apologize. But then she was scared that I knew who she was and when I pointed out that she had called me, she goes, "Oh. Right," and hung up. A couple hours later she had calmed down enough that when she called back to again apologize, we had a nice conversation and I ended up with her name and phone number. Unfortunately, I had to report for basic training the next day, but we stayed in touch and we went out twice when I was home on leave. She was an extremely nice gal (and an amateur fashion model). Sadly, we both knew that a long-distance relationship that was just starting out wasn't the way to go. I hope she found happiness.
Ha ha, that is a great story. Well I'm sure her memories are as fond as yours. Thanks for sharing.
 

MisterBill2

Joined Jan 23, 2018
18,167
I still suggest using a text to speech application because obviously, what was never present can not be recovered. If that were coupled to a speech recognition program probably it could run close to real time.
OR, you could pass your speech through an amplifier with a lot of harmonic distortion, possibly like some radio operators do to add more punch to their voice for contest communication.
Of course the resulting speech does not sound at all natural.
And now for the scammer calls, NEVER say yes to anything, because they can use that to show agreement to some sort of deal. The one is where they ask if you can hear them, when clearly you can. Always answer "NO".
 
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Thread Starter

bypassrestrictions

Joined Jun 1, 2021
107
The lady from India on NCTV has a strong accent. The accent is mostly from Britain when she said "killer" it sounded like "killah". The people in Britain never pronounce the letter "R". "Water" sounds like "wotah" and the voice level fades away at the end of every sentence, maybe of running out of breath.
Every weekend I watch the Formula One car race on TV. The announcers are British and they say "racing cah and fahstest cah" over and over.

I am from Canada where we speak every letter (Killer sounds like killer and Water sounds like water) and we sound the same from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. People in Quebec speak mostly French so they have a strong accent when speaking English.

The "Voice Changer" is too simple to produce accents.
That is strange because I thought her accent was neutral, maybe because I'm an Indian and I'm used to listening to such accent. People in India prefer received pronunciation of the British, that is probably why she isn't pronouncing the'r' sound at the end of the words, she at least doesn't have the inflection of received pronunciation, which the owner of the NDTV news channel has.
 

k1ng 1337

Joined Sep 11, 2020
940
I still suggest using a text to speech application because obviously, what was never present can not be recovered. If that were coupled to a speech recognition program probably it could run close to real time.
OR, you could pass your speech through an amplifier with a lot of harmonic distortion, possibly like some radio operators do to add more punch to their voice for contest communication.
Of course the resulting speech does not sound at all natural.
And now for the scammer calls, NEVER say yes to anything, because they can use that to show agreement to some sort of deal. The one is where they ask if you can hear them, when clearly you can. Always answer "NO".
I'm curious to know if it's still possible to determine my identity if I change my vocal pattern significantly.

I know banks and police have tools that can essentially "fingerprint" someone. For example, the way you handwrite has distinct characteristics. Many court cases have been predicated on this kind of reconstructed evidence. Surely it costs massive tax dollars to run these tests though.

I remember one case where a killer made the consistent error of using "antifree" instead of antifreeze in a forged suicide note. Interesting that that is how they got her. So text may not always save you!
 

MisterBill2

Joined Jan 23, 2018
18,167
Regarding the woman with the "India" accent: Given that it is a quite large country with many different groups and many different social classes, each living in different sectors, it is very probable that there are a very large number of differences among the citizens.
And in addition to that, there is also Pakistan next to India, that also has a large population, and whose accent may confuse those not being able to tell the difference.
AND now I wonder how the topic drifted this far. All web messages tend to have some provider added identification so that no matter what, most postings or messages can be tracked by those having the resources. The CIA and the FBI may not admit to what they can do,and I am certain that both China and Russia have resources and abilities that we can not imagine. Police States use that to keep control, you know.
 

Thread Starter

bypassrestrictions

Joined Jun 1, 2021
107
In google I could not find a demo of the cheap "Voice Disguiser" sold at Amazon.
And they are not cheap, certainly not to me and most Indians, it is questions of a salary of a month for most people here. They are available on YouTube, search for "voice changer buy amazon", it'll show results.

Here is one from outside India:

Here is one from India:
 
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k1ng 1337

Joined Sep 11, 2020
940
And they are not cheap, certainly not to me and most Indians, it is questions of a salary of a month for most people here. They are available on YouTube, search for "voice changer buy amazon", it'll show results.

Here is one from outside India:

Here is one from India:
I don't understand. Are you embarrassed by the way you sound compared to native English speakers? I understand your original concern about changing your voice but I suspect the issue is self confidence. If so I'd like to share a story which I apply to my life from time to time:

When I was young, maybe 12, I had a baseball hat that I would move around a lot trying to look as cool as possible. My older brother then informed me that by trying so hard to look cool, I looked dumb. He then said to me that if I wear it however I want and respect myself, most people will recognize that confidence and automatically respect it too.

I have found this to be true for most people, and more importantly people worthy of my time and attention. If they don't respect me after the truth is known and plain to see, that's their right and I'm okay with that.

There are some Indian guys who use their accent to make people laugh which is an advantage for their YouTube channel.

If you don't want to be a known for your Indian accent (made fun of for it etc.), then speak intelligently so that no matter what you say, it is difficult for anyone to use it against you. Find ways to turn your weakness into strength.
 

MisterBill2

Joined Jan 23, 2018
18,167
Way back in high school there was one student who delighted in copying other people's speech. When he gained access to the PA system he made announcements that caused confusion and laughter, by imitating the principle. So it does not take equipment to do that, only talent and practice.
And who believes much of what they see and hear on yoo-toob anyway? Much of the stuff I have seen looks faked to me.
OR are you one of those who produces that stuff??
 
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