NEW YORK: According to a recent Baycrest study, older persons tend to be less capable than their younger counterparts to distinguish between computer-generated (AI) speech and human speech. "Findings from this study on computer-generated AI speech suggest that older adults may be at a higher risk of being taken advantage of," said Dr. Bjorn Herrmann, Baycrest's Canada Research Chair in Auditory Aging, Scientist at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute and lead author of this study.

"While this area of research is still in its infancy, further findings could lead to the development of training programs for older adults to help them navigate these challenges," he said. In this study, which was the first to examine AI speech recognition in older adults, younger (~30 years) and older (~60 years) adults listened to sentences spoken by 10 different human speakers (five male, five female) and sentences created using 10 AI voices (5 male, 5 female). In one experiment, participants were asked how natural they found the human and AI voices to be. In another, they were asked to identify whether a sentence was spoken by a human or by an AI voice.