Creepy, but of course it's just a continuation of something that's been going on for a long time. 

We all know about faked photographs. In the days of spiritualism people made faked photographs of ghosts and fairies and some people believed them. Soviet Russia was quite skillful at altering photographs, particularly removing people from group pictures, by artful retouching.

In the 1950s, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Roy Cohn put into evidence a photograph that seemed to prove something but was misleading; in this case, the lie had been told simply by cropping. A man seemed to be talking to someone sitting next to him when he was really talking to someone out of frame.

In the 1970s, I think it was, the Whole Earth Review ran an article with a title something like "Forget Photographs As Evidence of Anything," talking about what could be done with... phooey, I can't even remember the name. The $30,000 workstations made by some Israeli company that magazines used for image editing. At the time, most people were unfamiliar with them. There was a minor scandal when National Geographic "moved a pyramid." They ran a cover picture in which one of the Great Pyramids of Egypt had been moved to make a better composition on the page. 

The falsification of sound is often dated to the introduction of magnetic tape recording, which can be edited without producing audible clicks. I was told in the 1960s that classical piano recordings typically contained hundreds and hundreds of edits and that "the back of the master tape was almost white with splicing tape." 

I don't think photographs or sound recordings have ever been admissible in a court of law unless there is personal testimony that they are authentic.

Yes, of course, this sound editing demonstration shows that things have been taken to a new level. But it's a matter of degree, not of kind.

What amazed me was how (apparently) simple the programme is to use. Naturally, with Audacity, Protools, Praat or other audio editing software it's already possible to make anyone say anything you want (how many "Obama singing" videos are out on Youtube already!). However these require quite a bit of skill to use really effectively. What's new with VoCo is just how easy it is to use...the notion of just typing a line of text and getting someone's voice to say it is truly amazing.

I honestly don't see this leading to any more abuse than visual photoshopping has. I suppose some security systems with voice analysis systems might be in danger, but that seems relatively easy to remedy.

Thank you Alan for sharing this piece of information and this video, which was very interesting and funny! It lets us practice English in a very useful way.

Pros

I think this tool might be useful for deaf people as it transcribes what the audio says (I think it does, it is shown when he starts using VoCo), so in the future there might be an app using this VoCo program that will let deaf people read what others say in real life.

On the other hand, it might let you have texts read by a particular voice and in a proper intonation, so far the voice readers I have used were quite limited in this sense. In fact, I would also say he mentions this at the end of the video. 

Cons

As everything about technologies, there might be people who will misuse them and although it is said there will be way to identify frauds but I think that won't be so easy. Anyway the benefits of it does overpass the cons, so I guess it will be worth using it!

Thank you, again! :)

You can do the same  small tricks even now with the Audacity.exe and/or CutMp3.exe. Jist Select, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V and cut off fragments you don't need.

Scitex. That was the name I was trying to remember, Scitex. Scitex workstations moved the pyramid, and it was in 1984. Adobe Photoshop came out in 1988, but for a while it was still a professional tool because it required a very high-end computer to run well.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/04/magazine/photography-s-new-bag-of-tricks.html

"The traffic jam around the Eiffel Tower is created by replicating cars from other parts of the Midtown picture. The tower of the Empire State Building is copied and moved slightly uptown, and a few stories are added to its height. Using the controls to draw free hand, the operator creates a realistic, but undistinctive, roof on the lower stories of the remaining Empire State Building, and twists the top of the Citicorp Building 180 degrees...."

"What is disquieting about the new technology is that its effectiveness, both in compositing and synthesizing photographs, may lead to dangerous deceptions, such as a supposed meeting of Kennedy and Castro. Realistic-looking photographic images, now prized for their veracity, may be harder to trust...."