Your Voice Cloning System is Secretly a Voice Anonymizer

Speaker anonymization suppresses speaker-identifying attributes from speech while preserving linguistic content and quality. We propose repurposing XTTSv2, a multilingual voice cloning model trained on 27k hours of speech, for speaker anonymization without retraining. Our key insight is that XTTSv2's voice cloning capabilities preserve prosodic structure independently of speaker identity, enabling voice conversion by conditioning on a pseudo-speaker. We introduce an iterative refinement strategy that balances privacy and utility by maximizing a harmonic mean of speaker dissimilarity and intelligibility. Evaluated on seven European languages across CommonVoice and Multilingual LibriSpeech, our system achieves near-optimal privacy (EER $\approx$ 0.49), competitive intelligibility, and substantially better speech quality than dedicated anonymization baselines, while requiring no language-specific training. We release the code here: https://github.com/rm00cr/coqui-tts.

Deriving Benchmarking Datasets from Long-Form Recordings: Challenges and Opportunities

Long-form recordings (LFRs) of child-centered audio are ecologically valid sources for studying early language development, but three problems limit their use. First, LFR corpora are collected across sites with heterogeneous formats and consent structures, making cross-corpus use non-trivial. Second, without standardized benchmarks, assessing whether tools generalize across languages and conditions is hard. Third, ML workflows rarely respect privacy constraints governing sensitive child speech. This paper presents a framework addressing all three: a standardized collection of 27 child-centered datasets built with open-source tools (S1); a replicable pipeline for four speech-processing benchmarks (S2); and ELSI, a role-based ecosystem embedding ethical governance into the ML workflow (S3). We demonstrate the framework via a voice type classification case study and show the three solutions are mutually dependent.

Detecting Audio Deepfakes on the Edge:Lightweight SSL-Based Detection in a Browser Plugin

Audio deepfakes are a growing challenge for the general public, as well as for journalists and fact-checkers. The latter need reliable tools to verify the authenticity of their sources, while at the same time keeping their information private. Commercial deepfake detection solutions rely on cloud-based processing, which raises privacy concerns. To solve this problem, we propose an on-device audio deepfake detection model. We show that a truncated self-supervised backbone with a simple logistic classifier is both very fast and often more accurate than existing solutions. Our solution outperforms the baseline AASIST by 10% and improves inference speed by 40%. We integrate this model into a browser plug-in, which allows journalists and fact-checkers to detect deepfakes easily and securely. Code for the plugin is available at https://github.com/OctavianPascu97/Audio-Deepfakes-Browser-Plugin.

Child-Centric Voice Anonymization in Single and Multi-Speaker Speech via Domain-Adapted SSL Models

Voice anonymization aims to protect speaker identity while preserving linguistic content and speech usability. However, most anonymization systems are developed on adult speech, leading to degraded performance when applied to child speech. This paper investigates child-centric anonymization by adapting a self-supervised learning (SSL) based anonymization pipeline to the child speech domain. The system is adapted using child speech from the MyST corpus and evaluated under both single-speaker and two-speaker mixture conditions. Experimental results show that child-domain adaptation improves intelligibility and perceptual quality while maintaining strong privacy protection. Extending the approach to multi-speaker further demonstrates that combining target speaker extraction with child-adapted anonymization provides privacy protection while preserving conversational structure. These findings highlight the importance of child-specific adaptation for practical speech anonymization systems.

DiffAnon: Diffusion-based Prosody Control for Voice Anonymization

To preserve or not to preserve prosody is a central question in voice anonymization. Prosody conveys meaning and affect, yet is tightly coupled with speaker identity. Existing methods either discard prosody for privacy or lack a principled mechanism to control the utility-privacy trade-off, operating at fixed design points. We propose DiffAnon, a diffusion-based anonymization method with classifier-free guidance (CFG) that provides explicit, continuous inference-time control over prosody preservation. DiffAnon refines acoustic detail over semantic embeddings of an RVQ codec, enabling smooth interpolation between anonymization strength and prosodic fidelity within a single model. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first voice anonymization framework to provide structured, interpolatable inference-time prosody control. Experiments demonstrate structured trade-off behavior, achieving strong utility while maintaining competitive privacy across controllable operating points.