  Recent breakthroughs in zero-shot voice synthesis have enabled imitating a
speaker's voice using just a few seconds of recording while maintaining a high
level of realism. Alongside its potential benefits, this powerful technology
introduces notable risks, including voice fraud and speaker impersonation.
Unlike the conventional approach of solely relying on passive methods for
detecting synthetic data, watermarking presents a proactive and robust defence
mechanism against these looming risks. This paper introduces an innovative
audio watermarking framework that encodes up to 32 bits of watermark within a
mere 1-second audio snippet. The watermark is imperceptible to human senses and
exhibits strong resilience against various attacks. It can serve as an
effective identifier for synthesized voices and holds potential for broader
applications in audio copyright protection. Moreover, this framework boasts
high flexibility, allowing for the combination of multiple watermark segments
to achieve heightened robustness and expanded capacity. Utilizing 10 to
20-second audio as the host, our approach demonstrates an average Bit Error
Rate (BER) of 0.48\% across ten common attacks, a remarkable reduction of over
2800\% in BER compared to the state-of-the-art watermarking tool. See
https://aka.ms/wavmark for demos of our work.
