We are moving toward a world where privacy may not exist, and security will be incredibly difficult. More of us need to be involved in the debate on how technology may be changing society, and what we should do about it. Bruce Schneier, quoted in full:
LyreBird is a system that can accurately reproduce the voice of someone, given a large amount of sample inputs. It's pretty good -- listen to the demo here -- and will only get better over time.
The applications for recorded-voice forgeries are obvious, but I think the larger security risk will be real-time forgery. Imagine the social engineering implications of an attacker on the telephone being able to impersonate someone the victim knows.
I don't think we're ready for this. We use people's voices to authenticate them all the time, in all sorts of different ways.