Adobe Voco


Adobe Voco will be an audio editing and generating prototype software by Adobe that enables novel editing and generation of audio. Dubbed "Photoshop-for-voice", it was first previewed at the Adobe MAX event in November 2016. The technology shown at Adobe MAX was a preview that could potentially be incorporated into Adobe Creative Cloud. In 2019, it was revealed that Voco was never meant to be released and was a proof-of-concept.

Technical details

As the demo showed, the software takes approximately 20 minutes of the desired target's speech and then generated sound-alike voice with even phonemes that were not present in the target example material. Adobe has stated Voco will lower the cost of audio production. With the introduction of Adobe Voco and the similarly capable WaveNet, produced by DeepMind.

Concerns

Ethical and security concerns have been raised over the ability to alter an audio recording to include words and phrases the original speaker never spoke, and the potential risk to voiceprint biometrics.
There are also concerns that it may be used in conjunction with:
Adobe's lack of publicized progress has opened opportunities for other companies to build alternative products to VOCO, such as LyreBird.
WaveNet is a similar but open-source research project at London-based artificial intelligence firm DeepMind, developed independently around the same time as Adobe Voco.