Voice cloning
Voice cloning is the use of AI to replicate a specific person's voice closely enough to generate new speech in that voice — often from only seconds of sample audio.
How to recognise
Because most people treat a familiar voice as proof of identity, voice cloning is a powerful deception tool. It underpins executive voice-clone fraud, fake "family emergency" scams in which a relative's voice begs for money, and synthetic political robocalls. The sample needed is trivial to obtain for anyone with a public profile — a clip, an interview, a voicemail greeting.
The defence is to stop treating a voice as proof: confirm any urgent or unusual request through a separate, known channel, and agree on a private code word with family members and finance teams that a cloned voice would not know.