AI-generated voices have become remarkably convincing. Services like ElevenLabs, Amazon Polly Neural, and dozens of other text-to-speech platforms can now clone voices with startling accuracy. While these technologies enable amazing applications—from audiobooks to accessibility tools—they also raise serious concerns about misinformation, fraud, and identity theft.
In this post, we'll build a production-ready deepfake audio detection system that can distinguish human speech from AI-generated audio in real-time. We'll cover the complete machine learning lifecycle: creating a high-quality dataset with sophisticated audio preprocessing, fine-tuning a Wav2Vec2 transformer model using transfer learning, and deploying it to Amazon SageMaker with streaming inference support.
By the end, you'll understand how to:
- Implement a two-pass audio splitting algorithm with Voice Activity Detection for optimal training data
- Leverage transfer learning to achieve 99%+ accuracy with minimal training time