Popular Voice Apps Capturing Your Voice Secretly: Voice technology has proven itself to be one of the most useful technologies that is being used by people in their daily lives. From Siri to Alexa, people are using this technology to perform small tasks and to ask big questions.
Why are Voice Apps becoming so popular?
Voice Apps have quickly become one of the inseparable technologies in modern life. From helping us quickly search and play a song to performing tasks for us on our mobiles, televisions, and laptops, it is everywhere. All of the existing and upcoming apps are integrating voice search technologies into them.
With so many people around the globe using it as a part of their day-to-day lives, there is a large amount of data that is being collected by these applications.
Can Voice Apps really secretly record audio?
There have been growing privacy-related concerns about whether voice apps are secretly capturing the voices of their users. This is greatly concerning because this can lead to identity-related theft, and there is a possibility of financial fraud and other cyber crimes as well.
- Malicious Apps – There is always a possibility that malicious apps might have been installed in your phone under the guise of a legitimate one and might be running in the background without the user being aware of it.
- Accidental Activation- With the rise of usage of voice assistants like Siri, Google, and Alexa, some words might end up activating the apps and which might lead to capturing of conversations.
- Back-end updates- Many apps release their updates, which most of the time end up bypassing the permissions that are required.
- There are various other types of sophisticated methods that can easily be used to exploit these voice apps by hackers, which might not be easy to identify by users.
We have listed below a list of 6 of the most popular apps that might be tracking every word you say.
Popular Voice Apps That Could Be Tracking Every Word You Say
ElevenLabs
- ElevenLabs is a free text-to-speech & AI Voice Generator. It is a voice app that generates high-quality audio through an AI voice generator that can be used for videos, podcasts, and audiobooks.
- It is widely used for its voice cloning technology. However, there have been reports by multiple sources of it being used for cybercrime purposes.
- This app requires users to consent to certain terms and conditions that the app holds the right to clone the voice samples of its users.
Descript
Descript is another app that provides powerful video and audio editing. It has features that enable voice dubbing and transcription as well.
Play.ht
It is an app that is used for corporate training, and it stores user-generated content on it, which includes retention of voice samples.
Voice.ai
This platform is used mainly by gamers and streamers. It offers the feature of real-time voice changing and is used globally. It offers a unique feature of real-time audio processing, but the data policies surrounding it remain largely vague.
Speechify
Speechify requires access to a microphone and text data before it can be used. It is an app that enables users to convert text to speech. There is concern about long-term storage of this data.
AI Voice Cloning or Clony AI (iOS)
This allows the users to create cloned versions of the user’s voice, but has the potential of being misused and hence this raises serious concerns with respect to its usage.
These voice samples can be uploaded anywhere and shared without the knowledge of the user, which can lead to potential malicious use.
Ways to safely use voice apps and protect privacy
- Managing App permissions and regularly reviewing them.
- Disabling voice activation when not using the app.
- Deleting old recordings, if any.
- Using strong passwords for these apps so that there is less likelihood of any breach with respect to sensitive data.
- Not mentioning sensitive information while using the apps.
There is no denying that voice apps are largely beneficial, but at the same time, whether or not these voice apps are secretly capturing the voice of their users is something that needs to be looked into. Users should be aware about the apps that they are using so that they can be mindful and exercise due caution when sharing their personal information.
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