Advancing AI Safety with Reality Defender

As AI-generated voices get better, so too must the tools that detect them. Over the past several months, we’ve worked with Reality Defender to help improve the detection of synthetic voices - making sure that, as voice technology advances, so does the public’s ability to determine what is AI-generated and what is authentic. 

Reality Defender describes this collaboration as “transformative” for detection systems. By integrating our synthetic voice data into their models, they’ve “expanded and improved [their] ability to identify sophisticated voice deepfakes.”

A key takeaway from this work is the importance of real-world, high-quality data. As they put it, our collaboration has helped them train detection systems on “the kind most likely to be used in real-world fraud attempts.”

Reality Defender has published a blog on their work detecting AI-generated voices, including their collaboration with us. Read their full perspective below.

Strengthening Digital Trust: How ElevenLabs Helps Reality Defender Advance Voice Deepfake Detection

The increasing sophistication of AI-generated content has intensified the need for robust synthetic media detection capabilities. Over the past several months, Reality Defender's strategic partnership with ElevenLabs has yielded significant technological advances in our ability to detect AI-generated voice content, providing crucial insights into the evolving landscape of synthetic media detection. Our analysis of this collaboration reveals transformative improvements in both the scope and accuracy of our detection capabilities, setting new benchmarks for the industry.

A Strategic Partnership for Digital Integrity

Reality Defender's mission to secure critical communication channels against deepfake impersonations aligns perfectly with ElevenLabs' commitment to responsible AI development. This collaboration represents a shared vision: ensuring that as voice synthesis technology advances, so too do the tools to detect its misuse.

Through this partnership, Reality Defender has integrated ElevenLabs' comprehensive voice synthesis data from existing and future models into our detection systems, dramatically expanding and improving our ability to identify sophisticated voice deepfakes. The impact has been transformative. Our training datasets have been enriched with over 295 hours of high-quality synthetic voice data, providing unprecedented depth and variety in our detection capabilities.

Our audio detection models have achieved full integration with all of ElevenLabs' voice models, enabling comprehensive coverage across the synthetic voice landscape. This collaboration has yielded a tenfold improvement in data generation efficiency, accelerating our ability to adapt to emerging threats. Compared to other synthetic voice platforms, ElevenLabs provides one of the most user-friendly interfaces, allowing us to generate and process data at least 10 times faster than alternative solutions. Perhaps most significantly, thanks to our partnership with ElevenLabs, the Reality Defender team has expanded our detection capabilities to cover multiple languages and accents, reflecting the global nature of synthetic voice challenges.

Technical Innovation at Scale

What makes this partnership particularly powerful is the quality and diversity of ElevenLabs' synthetic voice data. Representing approximately 20% of our total training dataset, this data provides our detection models with exposure to commercial-grade synthetic voices — the kind most likely to be used in real-world fraud attempts. Without ElevenLabs' contribution, our training set would lack critical real-world diversity and would be significantly weaker in detecting synthetic voices used in practical scenarios. This commercial-quality data has proven essential in maintaining our state-of-the-art detection system against sophisticated voice deepfakes.

The technical implementation focuses on three key areas:

1. Comprehensive Model Training: By incorporating ElevenLabs' diverse voice synthesis data, our detection models gain exposure to a wide range of synthetic voice characteristics, improving accuracy across different scenarios.
2. Multi-Language Capability: The partnership enables detection across 8 languages, with more in development, addressing the global nature of voice-based threats.
3. Real-World Application: Unlike provenance-based approaches that rely on watermarking or original source verification, our inference-based detection can identify synthetic content regardless of its origin.

Demonstrable Impact

The results of this collaboration speak volumes. Our team has achieved a significant expansion of our synthetic voice detection capabilities, setting new standards for accuracy and reliability in the field. Our enhanced ability to identify commercial-grade voice deepfakes represents a crucial advancement in protecting against sophisticated threats. Through more efficient data generation processes, we've accelerated our development cycles, enabling faster response to emerging synthetic voice technologies. Furthermore, our broader language coverage now provides robust detection capabilities for global threat scenarios, addressing the international nature of synthetic media challenges.

Looking Forward

This partnership represents more than just a technical collaboration — it is a model for how AI companies can work together to ensure the responsible development of powerful new technologies. As voice synthesis capabilities continue to advance, our partnership with ElevenLabs ensures that Reality Defender's detection capabilities evolve in parallel.

We're proud to work with ElevenLabs in this crucial effort to protect digital authenticity and maintain trust in our increasingly AI-enabled world. Together, we're setting new standards for responsible AI development while providing the tools necessary to identify and prevent the misuse of synthetic media.

The threat landscape continues to evolve, with financial fraud losses from deepfakes projected to reach tens of billions of dollars in the coming years. Through partnerships like this one, we're building the infrastructure needed to protect organizations and individuals from sophisticated impersonation attempts while supporting the positive applications of AI technology.