The rising trend of using voice as a means of interacting with smart devices has sparked worries over the protection of users' privacy and data security. These concerns have become more pressing, especially after the European Union's adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The information contained in an utterance encompasses critical personal details about the speaker, such as their age, gender, socio-cultural origins and more. If there is a security breach and the data is compromised, attackers may utilise the speech data to circumvent the speaker verification systems or imitate authorised users. Therefore, it is pertinent to anonymise the speech data before being shared across devices, such that the source speaker of the utterance cannot be traced. Voice conversion (VC) can be used to achieve speech anonymisation, which involves altering the speaker's characteristics while preserving the linguistic content.

翻译：随着使用语音与智能设备交互的趋势日益增长，人们对用户隐私和数据安全的担忧也随之加剧。尤其在欧盟通过《通用数据保护条例》（GDPR）后，这些关切愈发紧迫。语音信息中包含说话人的关键个人特征，例如年龄、性别、社会文化背景等。一旦发生安全漏洞导致数据泄露，攻击者可能利用语音数据绕过说话人验证系统或模仿授权用户。因此，在跨设备共享语音数据前对其进行匿名化处理至关重要，以确保无法追溯语音片段的原始说话人。语音转换技术（VC）可通过改变说话人特征同时保留语言内容，实现语音匿名化。