Dubbed Project VoCo, the prototype might best be described as 'Photoshop for voice', enabling anyone to freely edit the spoken content in audio recordings – in much the same way as programs like Photoshop allows you to edit visual data.

Previewing the app at the Adobe Max 2016 software expo last week, researcher Zeyu Jin from Princeton University showed just how easy it will be in the near future to manipulate and transform sound files - and in extreme cases effectively put words that were never actually said into people's mouths.

While audio-editing apps have long enabled people to manually cut, copy, and splice together parts of sound waves, VoCo (voice conversion) operates on a new principle, using an algorithm that breaks down and recompiles human speech.

Adobe hasn't explained how this technology works just yet, but the software seems to identify and log phonemes – the individual speech sounds we put together to make up words and sentences.