AI Voice Cloning: Trust, Persuasion, and Who's at Risk

When you call your bank, your doctor's office, or your financial planner, the voice that greets you may have been deliberately engineered to make you feel safe, calm, and compliant — and you almost certainly can't tell. Research shows people correctly identify synthetic voice only about 55% of the time. That's barely better than a coin flip.

In this co-host deep dive, Kimberly and Jessica pull apart what "voice" actually is (pitch, pace, prosody, timbre, accent) and why those features matter for trust, persuasion, and power. Synthetic voice isn't new, but the technology has crossed a threshold because it now replicates the subtle features that signal warmth, authority, and credibility. That has obvious applications in healthcare and customer service. It also powers grandparent scams, deepfake executive impersonation, and sales pipelines designed to move you from skepticism to compliance before you notice what happened. 

In this episode:

• What linguistics actually tells us about why we trust certain voices (and why politicians hire coaches to lower their pitch)
• The FTC's 2024 numbers on imposter scams — $700 million lost by people over 60 in one year, a 362% increase from 2020
• The Hong Kong finance worker who wired ~$25 million USD (HK$200 million) after a deepfake CFO appeared on a Zoom call
• ElevenLabs, Speechify, and the companies building what they call "emotional operating systems" for AI
• Trust vs. persuasion: when shared goals protect you — and when they don't
• Why older adults are the highest-risk population, and why detection tools aren't the solution
• Where regulation actually stands: New York's synthetic performer law (SB 7013), the EU AI Act, and what's still missing
• Practical questions to ask yourself — and the companies you interact with

Mentioned in this episode:

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Project Hail Mary directed by Drew Goddard, starring Ryan Gosling (film, 2025)
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• "Walk my Walk" by Blanco Brown (the real human artist)
• "Walk my Walk" by Breaking Rust (the AI-generated version)
• Kimberly and Jessica's paper: "Defining and assessing AI literacy for researchers across the research lifecycle" in Frontiers in Education