Boffins devise voice-altering tech to jam 'vishing' schemes

Researchers based in Israel and India have developed a defense against automated call scams.

ASRJam is a speech recognition jamming system that uses a sound modification algorithm called EchoGuard to apply natural audio perturbations to the voice of a person speaking on the phone. It's capable of subtly distorting human speech in a way that baffles most speech recognition systems but not human listeners.

The tech is needed because recent advances in machine learning, text-to-speech (TTS), and automatic speech recognition (ASR) have made it quite easy to automatically make phone calls with the intent to scam or defraud.

These "vishing" attacks – like email-based phishing but using voice instead of text – see criminals and scammers use TTS to create a realistic-sounding voice that speaks words they hope will lure victims. If the recipient of a call responds, the crook's ASR system attempts to convert their vocal response to text ...