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The threat of deepfakes is grow as the AI pecker to create them become widely accessible . There was a 245 % increase in deepfakes worldwidefrom 2023 to 2024 , an uptick spur in part by come election rhythm , according to substantiation supplier Sumsub . It ’s also impact the corporate sector ; a recent Business.com survey found that10 % of companies have faced deepfake - aided pretender , like cloned voice .
The tendency , unsurprisingly , has been a manna from heaven for companies marketing tool to defend against deepfakes and technologies used to produce them . One of those society , Pindrop , on Wednesday announced that it secured a $ 100 million , five - year loan from Hercules Capital , which CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan say is being reserve for product exploitation and hiring .
“ With advancements in generative AI , voice cloning in particular has become a powerful instrument , ” Balasubramaniyan told TechCrunch . “ Deepfake signal detection leverage AI detecting technologies is now needed by every call center to continue one step ahead of fraudsters . ”
Pindrop builds deepfake - combating and multi - factor authentication product target businesses in banking , finance and related to industry . The company claims its tool can ID touch centerfield callers , for example — and with higher accuracy than rival solutions .
“ Pindrop leverages a dataset of over 20 million utterances , both synthetic and genuine , to train the AI models to severalise between genuine human voices and synthetically generate ones , ” Balasubramaniyan said . “ We ’ve also trained over 330 school text - to - speech ( TTS ) models to assist identify TTS models used to make the deepfake . ”
Bias is a uncouth trouble in deepfake espial model . Many audio modelstend to be biased toward recognize Western , American voices and perform ill with different accents and dialects , which could head a detector to class a legitimate voice as a deepfake .
It ’s up for public debate whether synthetical training data — education data generated by AI simulation themselves — mitigates or exacerbatesthe bias . For what it ’s worth , Balasubramaniyan mean the former and claims that Pindrop ’s voice hallmark products focus on the “ acoustic and spectro - secular feature ” of voices as opposed to pronunciation or language .
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“ AI - based voice recognition systems tend to display biased results towards tonal , accent , common and dialect differences which could have racial deduction , ” Balasubramaniyan said . “ These biases are derived from homogeneousness of the data point that is used to prepare the system that may miss in delegacy of various cultural , racial , sexuality or other differences , thus throttle the variety of datum that the AI system are train on . ”
Regardless of its products ’ efficacy , Pindrop has made substantial inroad since 2011 , when Balasubramaniyan , an ex - Googler , launch the ship’s company with former Barracuda Networks chief research officer Paul Judge and Mustaque Ahamad . To escort , the Atlanta - based firm , which employs around 250 masses , has rear $ 234.77 million in venture Das Kapital from investor include Vitruvian Partners , CapitalG , IVP and Andreessen Horowitz .
Asked why Pindrop opted for debt as oppose to equity this clock time around , Balasubramaniyan said that it was an “ attractive pick ” to “ efficiently raise growth capital ” without diluting Pindrop ’s fairness . ( That ’s acommon strategy . )
The yield from the loan will enable Pindrop to fetch its tech to new sector , Balasubramaniyan added , such as healthcare , retail , medium and locomotion .
“ With the advent of generative AI , we are seeing a massive demand for our root worldwide , and be after to seem at expanding into state that are seeing significant threats due to deepfakes , ” Balasubramaniyan enunciate . “ Pindrop is positioned to help company protect themselves and their consumer from rising dupery and deepfake threats with role player bar , certification and liveness solutions . ”
