When US woman Jennifer DeStefano picked up a call from an unknown number she never thought it would be her worst nightmare – one of her children getting kidnapped.

“I pick up the phone, and I hear my daughter's voice, and it says, 'Mum!' and she's sobbing,” DeStefano recalled.

“I said, 'What happened?' And she said, 'Mum, I messed up,' and she's sobbing and crying.”

DeStefano, who lives in Arizona, said she did not have any reason to doubt that it wasn’t her daughter’s voice, reported CNN. Her 15-year-old was on a skiing trip out of town and the possibility that she was in danger was real.

“This man gets on the phone, and he's like, 'Listen here. I've got your daughter. This is how it's going to go down. You call the police, you call anybody, I'm going to pop her so full of drugs. I'm going to have my way with her, and I'm going to drop her off in Mexico,”

However, luck was on DeStefano’s side that day. During the call, she was at her other daughter’s dance studio, surrounded by worried mothers who were calling 911 and her husband, in an attempt to help her.

Those extra phone calls confirmed that her daughter was indeed well and safe, CNN reported.

Even after the frightening incident, DeStefano couldn’t believe that it wasn’t her daughter’s voice as it had her “inflection”, imitating the exact way she would have cried.

“I never doubted for one second it was her. That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core,” she added.

The voice was, in fact, a clone generated by an Artificial Intelligence.

Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University, said that AI can produce clones with just three seconds of our actual voice.

“Most of the voice cloning actually captures the inflection as well as the emotion. The larger the sample, the better off you are in capturing those,” he told On Your Side.