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Eerily realistic AI voice demo sparks amazement and discomfort online

Sesame’s new AI voice model features uncanny imperfections, and it’s willing to act like an angry boss.

Sesame co-founder Brendan Iribe acknowledged current limitations in a comment on Hacker News, noting that the system is "still too eager and often inappropriate in its tone, prosody and pacing" and has issues with interruptions, timing, and conversation flow. The ability to generate highly convincing human-like speech has already supercharged voice phishing scams, allowing criminals to impersonate family members, colleagues, or authority figures with unprecedented realism. Although Sesame's demo does not clone a person's voice, future open source releases of similar technology could allow malicious actors to potentially adapt these tools for social engineering attacks.

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