Pindrop claims to detect AI audio deepfakes with 99% accuracy

Today, Pindrop, a company offering solutions for voice security, identity verification and fraud detection, announced the release of Pulse Inspect, a web-based tool for detecting AI-generated speech in any digital audio or video file with what it claims is a significantly high degree of accuracy: 99%.

The feature is available in preview as part of Pindrop’s Pulse suite of products and offers detection regardless of the tool or AI model the audio was generated from.

This is a notable and ambitious offering from general industry practice where AI vendors release AI classifiers only to detect synthetic content generated from their tools.

Pindrop is offering Pulse Inspect on a yearly subscription to organizations looking to combat the risk of audio deepfakes at scale. However, CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan tells VentureBeat that they may launch more affordable pricing tiers – with a limited number of media checks – for consumers as well.

“Our pricing is designed for organizations with a recurring need for deepfake detection. However, based on future market demand, we may consider launching pricing options better suited for casual users in the future,” he said.

Pindrop addresses the rise of audio deepfakes

While deepfakes have been around for a long time, the rise of text-based generative AI systems has made them more prevalent on the internet. Popular gen AI tools, like those from Microsoft and ElevenLabs, have been exploited to mimic the audio and video of celebrities, business persons and politicians to spread widespread misinformation/scams — affecting their public image.

According to Pindrop’s internal report, more than 12 million American adults know someone who has personally had deepfakes created without their consent. These duplicates could be anything from images to video to audio, but they all have one thing in common: they thrive on virality, spreading like wildfires on social media. 

To address this evolving problem, Pindrop announced the Pulse suite of products earlier this year. The first offering in the portfolio helped enterprises detect deepfake calls coming to their call centers. Now, with Pulse Inspect, the company is going beyond calls to help organizations check any audio/video file for AI-generated synthetic artifacts.

Upload questionable audio files for analysis

At the core, the offering comes as a web application, where an enterprise user can upload the questionable file for analysis.

Previously, the whole process of checking for synthetic artifacts in existing media files required time-consuming forensic examination. However, in this case, the tool processes the audio in a matter of seconds and comes up with a “deepfake score,” complete with sections that contain AI-generated speech. 

This quick response can then enable organizations to take proactive actions to prevent the spread of misinformation and maintain their brand credibility. 

Training and analysis process

Pindrop says it has trained a proprietary deepfake detection model on more than 350 deepfake generation tools, 20 million unique utterances and more than 40 languages, resulting in a rate of detecting deepfake audio at 99% based on the company’s internal analysis of a dataset of about 200k samples.

The model checks media files for synthetic artifacts every four seconds, ensuring it classifies deepfakes accurately, especially in the cases of mixed media containing both AI-generated and genuine elements.

“Pindrop’s technology leverages recent breakthroughs in deep neural networks (DNN) and sophisticated spectro-temporal analysis to identify synthetic artifacts using multiple approaches,” Balasubramaniyan explained.

No vendor-specific detection limits

Since Pindrop has trained its detection model on more than several hundred generation tools, Pulse Inspect has no tool-specific restriction for detection.

“There are over 350 deepfake generator systems, with many prolific audio deepfakes on social media likely coming from open-source tools rather than commercial ones like ElevenLabs. Customers need comprehensive tools like Pindrop’s, which are not limited to detecting deepfakes from a single system but can identify synthetic audio across all generation systems,” Balasubramaniyan added.

However, it is important to note that there may be cases where the tool might fail to identify deepfakes, especially when the file has less than two seconds of net speech or a very high level of background noise. The CEO said the company is working continuously to address these gaps and further improve detection accuracy.

Currently, Pindrop is targeting Pulse Inspect at organizations such as media companies, non-profits, government agencies, celebrity management firms, legal firms and social media networks. Balasubramaniyan did not share the exact number of customers using the tool but he did say that “a number of partners” are using the product by paying for a volume-based annual subscription. This includes TrueMedia.org, a free-use product that allows critical election audiences to detect deepfakes.

In addition to the web app supporting manual uploads, Pulse Inspect can also be integrated into custom forensic workflows via an API. This can power bulk use cases such as that of a social media network flagging and removing harmful AI-generated videos.

Moving ahead, Balasubramaniyan said, the company plans to bolster the Pulse suite by improving the explainability aspect of the tools – with a feature to trace back to the source of deepfake generations – and supporting more modalities.