  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.
