Safe word: What is it and why do you need one?
ESET recommends pre-agreed family safe words to counter AI voice-clone scams such as virtual kidnapping, as one-in-four Americans report receiving deepfake calls.
ESET outlines how scammers use just seconds of audio scraped from social media or work content to create convincing voice clones, with a Hiya report finding one-in-four Americans received a deepfake voice call in the past 12 months. Common schemes include virtual kidnapping calls mixing cloned voices with sobbing and background noise. A pre-agreed, non-OSINT-discoverable safe word, plus callback verification via known numbers and 2FA, reduces success rates of these frauds.
Building and Evaluating Fixed-Voice Thai TTS from Synthetic Speech
Researchers distill a compact 82M-parameter Thai TTS from synthetic OmniVoice data, enabling on-device fixed-voice synthesis without reference audio.
The paper uses a large voice-cloning model (OmniVoice) as a synthetic data source to train Wayu-Paxa-TTS-Edge, an 82M-parameter fixed-voice Thai TTS student. The model achieves 68.2% Challenge-Set Keyword Accuracy (85.5% of Gemini 3.1), 91.4% pause precision, and CERs of 3.7% on Thai and 1.1% on English. It outperforms its teacher on pause placement and is open-sourced with its evaluation framework.
Suno launches v6 music models built with Warner, BMG, and Believe
Suno launches v6, v6-wild, and free v6-mini music models co-developed with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe, retiring all older models.
Suno's flagship v6 serves Pro and Premier subscribers, v6-wild targets experimentation, and v6-mini is free; all three understand vocals, instrumentation, structure, mood, and multimodal inputs, with text-based editing of individual song sections. The models were built with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe following Warner's November 2025 licensing settlement, while Universal and Sony continue litigating and a Munich court found v3.5 and v4 infringed six works. Suno reports more than 100 million users, over two million paying subscribers, and $300 million ARR after raising $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation in June.