Glossary
Voice cloning
Voice cloning is the use of a model trained on recordings of one person to generate new speech in that person's voice. Some products need only minutes of clear audio, and cloned voices have been used in fraud, so recordings of your voice carry a real risk.
Updated October 17, 20264 cited facts, each traced to its source
Also called AI voice clone, audio deepfake.
Voice cloning is the use of a speech model trained on recordings of one specific person, so that it can generate new speech in that person's voice. The output can say words the person never said. An audio deepfake is the same technique used to deceive someone, usually by making a real person appear to be speaking.
Cloning needs far less audio than most people expect
ElevenLabs, a voice AI company, recommends about 1 to 2 minutes of clear audio, without reverb or background noise, for its instant voice cloning 1. That is a vendor's guidance for its own product, but it shows the scale of the input.
Consumer Reports tested the field in 2025. Its researchers easily created a voice clone from publicly available audio in four of the six voice cloning products they tested 2. Publicly available audio was enough for those tests.
Safeguards are often missing
The same review found that a majority of the products it assessed did not have meaningful safeguards to stop fraud or misuse 3. Safeguards can include consent checks, limits on cloning someone else's voice, or detection of misuse. Where they are missing, a clone can be made from a short recording by almost anyone.
A concrete example: a payment approved on a fake call
In 2024, an employee of the engineering firm Arup in Hong Kong paid out $25 million to fraudsters after a deepfake scam 4. The case shows that a voice alone is not proof of who is speaking.
Why it matters for dictation
Dictation does not need a copy of your voice to work. The risk comes from the audio that a service keeps. If a dictation app stores recordings on a server, those files can be leaked, reused or accessed by people the speaker never intended, and each one is a source of voice samples. Check whether the privacy policy says how long audio is kept, and whether you can delete it. Our guide answers whether stored recordings can be used to clone you.
If a service uses your voice to confirm your identity, a clone is a direct threat to that check. Speaker verification systems compare a voice against a stored voiceprint, and they should not be treated as proof on their own when the audio can be copied.
Related terms
- Biometric data: the category a voice falls into when it identifies a person.
- Speaker verification: checking identity from a voice sample.
- Voiceprint: the stored voice template a verification system compares against.
Guides and questions that cover it
Evidence
Every number on this page, with where it comes from. Open a fact to see the exact words in its source.
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Related terms
- Speech to Text Privacy: Where Your Voice GoesThe topic this term belongs to
- All-party consentAll-party consent is a recording rule under which every participant in a conversation must agree before it can be recorded or intercepted. California, Florida and Maryland use it in their statutes, and it is stricter than one-party consent.
- Attorney-client privilegeAttorney-client privilege protects confidential communications between a lawyer and their client about seeking legal advice or services. A third party who is present, or a tool that handles the conversation, can put that protection at risk.
- Biometric dataBiometric data is personal data produced by technical processing of a person's physical, physiological or behavioral characteristics that allows or confirms who that person is. A voice recording becomes biometric data when it is processed to identify the speaker.
- Business associate agreement (BAA)A business associate agreement (BAA) is the written contract that HIPAA requires before a covered entity lets a vendor create, receive, maintain or transmit protected health information on its behalf. Dictation tools used in clinics often need one, and a BAA alone does not make a product compliant.
- False accept (accidental activation)A false accept, also called a false wake or accidental activation, is when a voice assistant or dictation feature starts listening or recording although the wake word was not said. Smart speakers have been measured to wake by accident, and that can capture speech the user did not mean to share.
- Federated learningFederated learning is a way to train one machine learning model on data spread across many devices. Each device computes an update from its own data, and only those updates are sent to a server, so the raw data does not have to be collected in one place.
- On-device speech recognitionOn-device speech recognition converts speech to text with a model that runs on your own computer or phone, so the audio does not need to be sent to a server. It is also called local, offline or on-device dictation.
- One-party consentOne-party consent is a recording rule under which a conversation can be recorded lawfully when one of its participants agrees, which is usually the person doing the recording. The US federal wiretap law uses this rule, and individual states may set stricter ones.
- Protected health information (PHI)Protected health information (PHI) is individually identifiable health information that HIPAA protects when it is held or sent in electronic or other form by a covered entity or its business associate. Patient names with diagnoses, in dictated notes or voice recordings, are PHI. It is also called ePHI when held electronically.
- Speaker verificationSpeaker verification is a voice biometric check in which a system accepts or rejects a claimed identity by comparing a voice with stored models of the person claimed. It is also called voice authentication, voice ID or voice biometrics.
- Special category data (GDPR)Special category data is the group of personal data that Article 9 of the GDPR bans organizations from processing unless a listed exception applies. It includes health data and biometric data used to identify a person, and a voice recording can fall into it when it is processed that way.
- VoiceprintA voiceprint is a stored model of a person's voice, built from measurable features of their speech and used to recognize or verify that person. Illinois law lists voiceprints among biometric identifiers, and other vendors call the same idea a voice template or speaker model.
Pages that use this term
- Speech to Text Privacy: Where Your Voice GoesTopic
- Voice Cloning and Deepfakes: Risks and ProtectionGuide
- Can your stored voice recordings be used to clone your voice?Question
- How do you protect yourself from voice cloning scams?Question
- How much audio does it take to clone a voice?Question
- Is it legal to clone someone's voice?Question
- Is voice authentication still secure?Question
- Text to speech (TTS)Glossary