Voices-Photoshop
Adobe has developed a kind of Photoshop for audio recordings. This probably won't make the world any simpler.
Whether the world is really waiting for such products? Adobe will know. The company has already changed the world forever with its Photoshop software. The fact that one day you won't be able to tell from a picture whether what's being shown is real - you couldn't have assumed that a few decades ago.
Today, photos can be so genuinely retouched that they can influence people's perceptions and opinions. People think they are ugly because they do not correspond to the retouched, unrealistic ideals of beauty. People form an opinion because they believe deliberately distributed, faked photos to be real.
Abusive uses aside, Photoshop is and remains a brilliant chapter in software history. Photoshop can do simply everything and enriches millions of people's everyday work and leisure time.
What Adobe has now presented at the "Adobe Max 2016" conference is fascinating and scary at the same time. #VoCo will be part of the Creative Cloud and is still in development. The software lets the user type words and pronounce the sentences in any x voice. The software learns the desired voice through spoken or uploaded sample sentences. The sentences can then not only be rearranged, but also any words can be changed, deleted and replaced. In short, you can put words in people's mouths - literally.
The technology is guaranteed to be a lot of fun, but it also opens the door to abuse. Because once it's really matured and perfected, you soon won't be able to trust any audio document. Of course, you couldn't do that before either. But the hurdles to create a realistic fake were much higher. And that - there is no other way to put it - was a good thing. (hae)
