Ethics

We're committed to ensuring that our groundbreaking technology is only used for ethical projects — and doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

Our Mission

Some ethical questions about synthetic speech are easy, but others are hard. We don't just rely on our gut to tell us what is right. This set of principles guides our decision making.

  • Respeecher does not allow any deceptive uses of our technology.
  • Respeecher does not use voices without permission when this could impact the privacy of the subject or their ability to make a living.  In practice, this means we will never use the voice of a private person or an actor without permission. In a handful of cases we have used the voices of historical figures such as Richard Nixon and Barack Obama without permission but non-deceptively and for the purposes of showing what the technology can do.  While we will listen to requests, we are generally not open to doing new projects of this nature.
About us

Respeecher started with a simple idea. Could we clone human speech and swap voices?

LEARN MORE

Ethical voice cloning principles

We know voice cloning technology can be dangerous.

While we're using it to revolutionize movies, video games and other creative projects, it can also fool people into thinking someone said something they didn't. That's deception and it’s just plain wrong. It's wrong to defraud people. It's wrong to create fake news.

ethics1

Enforcement

It's all well and good to have strong principles, but how can we ensure that they are not violated?

  • Respeecher does not provide any public API for creating new voices.
  • Respeecher works directly with clients we trust.
  • Respeecher requires written consent from voice owners.
  • Respeecher only approves projects that meet our strict standards.
  • Respeecher is developing watermarking technology that allows us to easily tell Respeecher-generated content from other content, even if it is disguised by being mixed in with other audio.
ethics4
ethics5

Of course, we are not the only ones working on synthetic speech technology. As leaders in the space, we feel a responsibility to mitigate the impact of unethical use of related technology no matter who produces it.

We are just getting started in this area, but our goals are clear:

  • Educate the public about the capabilities of synthetic speech technology.
  • Develop automatic detection algorithms that can detect synthetic speech even if it has not been watermarked by us.
  • Work with gatekeepers of content such as Facebook and YouTube to limit the harm of voice cloning by bad actors through prominent labeling of all synthetic content and banning of particularly unethical content.

Ready to Replicate Voices?

Want to see our technology in action? Get a demo today.

REQUEST A DEMO