In the WDR «Westpol» TV magazine the students Denis Malinko and Boris Andreev (SuSe 2023/4th semester «Information and Communication Design, B.A.») made a voice DeepFake of the Interior Minister of North-Rhine Westphalia, Herbert Reul. 

Snippet of Wespol report

Under the audit and management of Dipl.-Des. Silke Gehrmann-Becker, together with Boris Andreev, we developed a strategy for selecting the necessary speech pattern for further manipulation.

After various researches it was concluded that those voice models that were freely available did not have the necessary level of development (at that time) to imitate German speech.

To test the models (with the official permission of the authorities), various fragments of the politician's speech were taken, cleaned of unnecessary sounds, improved sound quality, divided into 16-20 seconds (optimal time for the model to read the information) and passed through various speech models.

In the end, it was used the VoiceLab of ElevenLab and trained with the audio data. The result and the reporting was also filming in class of “Design Theory“ over the summer semester 2023 of Silke Gehrmann-Becker and a statement of Prof. Jörg Petri (Professor for Media Production).