 I'd like to tell you about voice, so now the words we say, but how we say them, right? The sound of someone's voice has an enormous power on your emotions. I can sound happy, I can sound sad, I can convince you, I can scare you off, I can inspire you into action. I'm a neuroscientist, so part of my job is to look into your brain and what's going on when you listen to someone's voice. And we know a fair bit about this, we know how voice is treated, we know how it speaks to your emotion centres, to your thoughts. One thing I didn't know until very recently is that we know how the technology, to take your voice and to change the sound of your voice as you speak, so that it can trigger all of these effects. So this technology may only be used in music studios right now, but it's ready basically, and my prediction is we're going to see it applied to our voices in our daily lives very soon. So I'd like to give you a couple of examples of what's going to happen when we have this. My first example is very, very simple, very basic. You know how you can take a record and you can speed it up or slow it down with your finger, right? So if you do this you'll get a sound that's a little bit higher or a little bit lower, right? If you do this someone's voice, that person may end up speaking a bit more happy or a bit more sad. Very simple. So we use that and we ask participants, so I'm doing experimental science, we get human participants, we got them in the lab and we asked them to read the text out loud. And while they were doing that we changed the sound of their voice as they were reading in real time so that they sounded to themselves a bit more happy or a bit more sad. We can do this with this very simple manipulation and what we found out, we measured the emotion of these people before they read and after they read. And we found that the people who listened to themselves with a happier tone of voice manipulated unbeknownst to them without their knowing. These people ended up more happy in the end than they were when they came in. And they thought that what they were reading was also more pleasant so it was the sound of their own voice that tricked them into thinking that. Second example is also fun, if you know this if you're on the phone people can tell if you're smiling or not. That's because stretching a corner of your lips like this is changing the shape of your mouth and people can hear that even if they don't see you. So the same thing we created software that can simulate the sound of smiling on people's voice and we had participants come in the same lab. What we do this time is we fit electrodes on their face, facial electromyography we call it and we played sentences that we manipulated to be more or less smiling. And we found that when you listen to someone smiling you will yourself start smiling in response. What is amazing is that people have no clue that they're doing it. It's completely unconscious even if you ask if the sentences were smiling they say no I don't think so but their muscles say it is. So what we're facing now is that we can turn voice into what I like to call a cognitive technology. Something with algorithms that you can transform sound so that it's selectively activates parts of your brain and we know what to expect in these effects. So this technology is now this is not five years ten years this I have it in the lab you know we can stop using it now. It's going to have a profound effect on our society think of a lawyer say whose voice can be made more convincing as he talks. Think of a business negotiation where your voice is being made more trustworthy. Think of a call center that's certainly sounding a lot friendlier and more understanding to you all of this by the turn of the button. Another sector which I think is going to be impacted there and care for very much is the theater pretty the clinical sector. Think of people with ALS for instance like the regreted Stefan Okins is using a very very dodgy speech synthesizer right. What if this voice this can voice could be made to match his emotion in real time. If he's having a good day you have a happy voice if you're having a bad day you have a sad voice. All of these applications are going to come up very very soon. So we tried something in the context of emergency medical systems you know when you call 911 for a problem. And we had actors giving fake calls to 911 and we manipulated their voice to sound more physically dominant like bigger or smaller. And we found that the doctors send 50% 50% more medical means to these patients than people without the voice manipulation. This is someone working for wired said the visuals biggest casualty to artificial intelligence is not the last job is all of that. It's the loss of trust in anything you hear or see from no one right. This is manipulated images and you know one is real the other one is computer generated you can't tell the difference. So voice has all these problems right the next one the next time you pick up the phone maybe the person you hear is happy or maybe she's just using the happy button. Maybe she's very friendly or maybe she just wants you to think she's very friendly for all we know maybe you're not even talking to the person you think you're talking to on that thing. So my point today is not to be afraid but it's kind of a wake up call it's to be aware of this. The way I see this we've been using voice as a preservation technology for many years. I mean what's you know for great progress and social change this is just a technological upgrade this is voice 2.0. We can use this for great opportunities in socioeconomical word in clinical work could use it for the worst as well. And I guess it's just time we start to conversation about this.