You hear one thing, but the computer hears another. What’s going on here?
Two researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have exploited the technique computers use to decode human speech to hide messages inside snippets of audio. When translated by a speech recognition program like Mozilla’s DeepSpeech, the computer ends up transcribing the hidden message instead of the sounds we hear.
The method basically involves hiding a quiet sample of the audio you actually want transcribed within a different portion of audio. The “secret message” registers to humans as nothing more than a bit of background noise, but because of the way computers process audio, they pick up on the hidden audio clearly. In a paper published to the pre-print server the arXiv, the researchers describe how they were able to manipulate DeepSpeech every single time they hid messages inside an audio sample.
It has to do with how ...
