VOXLET Team Advances Speech Anonymization Technology

Galois, GE Aerospace, and the University of Vermont (UVM) are excited to announce a collaboration on the Anonymous Real-Time Speech (ARTS) program, which seeks to develop new technologies for anonymizing conversational speech to help safeguard individual speakers’ identities. The ARTS program is funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — and its stakeholders in the United States Intelligence Community. 

The team’s solution, Vocal Obfuscation eXpert Language Encoding Technology (VOXLET), builds upon recent advances and investments in Artificial Intelligence and Differential Privacy research, and capitalizes upon the research team’s past collaborations and success across government agencies including the US Census and DARPA.

While many voice obfuscation solutions exist, thus far none of these solutions are applicable in a safety-critical setting where guarantees on user privacy and prevention of inference attacks are essential for user safety. Towards this end, the VOXLET approach combines learning neural network models with state-of-the-art formal privacy guarantees provided via differential privacy techniques. In addition, VOXLET will utilize novel compression techniques to enable system use on resource-limited hardware. 

Ultimately, VOXLET seeks to advance basic research in bridging machine learning with formal privacy theory, and sets the stage for future joint research projects on a variety of applications. These applications can range from secure telecommunications and realistic data synthesis, to efficiently and effectively harnessing the power of large models for embedded platforms. The enhancements to anonymizing data could also encourage more data collaborations within commercial industries like the aerospace sector. For example, airlines and aerospace OEMs are increasingly recognizing the significant value data collaborations with each other and software companies can bring for improving flight operations and safety. 

As ever, Galois remains committed to pushing forward the boundaries of scientific innovation with real-world impact. Our work with the ARTS Program represents another step towards meaningful advancements in both AI and user privacy challenges, and we look forward to sharing our progress.