VoicePM: A Robust Privacy Measurement on Voice Anonymity

Voice-based human-computer interaction has become pervasive in laptops, smartphones, home voice assistants, and Internet of Thing (IoT) devices. However, voice interaction comes with security and privacy risks. Numerous privacy-preserving measures have been proposed for hiding the speaker's identity while maintaining speech intelligibility. However, existing works do not consider the overall tradeoff between speech utility, speaker verification, and inference of voice attributes, including emotional state, age, accent, and gender. In this study, we first develop a tradeoff metric to capture voice biometrics as well as different voice attributes. We then propose VoicePM, a robust Voice Privacy Measurement framework, to study the feasibility of applying different state-of-the-art voice anonymization solutions to achieve the optimum tradeoff between privacy and utility. We conduct extensive experiments using anonymization approaches covering signal processing, voice synthesis, voice conversion, and adversarial techniques on three speech datasets that include both English and Chinese speakers to showcase the effectiveness and feasibility of VoicePM.