It was an average day in January when Jennifer DeStefano decided to answer a call from an unknown number. On the other end of the line, DeStefano's 15-year-old daughter was sobbing and begging for help.As DeStefano began to panic, a new voice came onto the line: her daughter's supposed kidnapper, demanding a $1 million ransom.DeStefano was frantically receiving ransom instructions from the kidnapper when a friend was able to get a call through to DeStefano's husband.
"We strongly believe with the explosion of AI, it's the threat of deepfakes that breaks all trust," Vijay Balasubramaniyan, the CEO and co-founder of Pindrop, told TheStreet in an interview. The software, powered by machine learning algorithms, presents a two-pronged defense against potential fraudsters. The first determines if a given voice is a human or a machine and the second ensures it is theIn terms of arming that first prong, Pindrop, employing data scientists who serve additionally as linguistics experts, has focused on the evolution of human linguistics.
Pindrop has an additional adversarial system that is designed to find ways to beat its vocal authenticator, making the flagship defensive software"generations ahead of any known attack," according to the company.The software, Balasubramaniyan said, acts as a sort of traffic light. An agent at a call center will see a real-time analysis of a call, designed to quickly determine if the voice on the other end is real, accurate or synthetic.