How Intelligible Are Cloned Voices?

Across Acoustics

Across Acoustics
How Intelligible Are Cloned Voices?
Apr 21, 2026
ASA Publications' Office

You may have heard of deepfakes—AI clones of people used to create lifelike video and audio to manipulate an audience. AI cloning technology, however, has much broader applications than just subterfuge. In this episode, we talk with Patti Adank (University College London), who studied the intelligibility of voice clones compared to their natural counterparts and sheds light on some potential benefits of this technology.


Associated paper: Patti Adank and Han Wang. "Voice clones are easier to understand in noise than their human originals: The voice cloning intelligibility benefit." J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 159 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0043094.


Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
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Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

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