Our Voice
Well, as I review some of the Postings of this blog site (and can you believe it, we will soon be approaching the magical number of 800 pretty soon???!!!) there is a Biometric I have not talked about in a while. It is one of those what I call the “silent type”, meaning its making its mark in the industry and in applications without too much fanfare in the press and media. That is known as Voice Recognition, and for once in quite some time, it is making waves in the headlines.
Here we go: “Voci Technologies Inc. today announced that it has been selected by the Office of Naval Research to begin the research and development for an advanced speaker identification (SID) system. The US and other governments look for clues in conversations as they attempt to thwart acts of fraud or terrorism, and the massive amount of unlabeled speech presents a significant challenge to this effort . . . The accelerated processing speeds of the Voci speech recognition appliances will allow clustering, tracking and analysis of speech on a speaker-by-speaker basis within huge databases of recorded audio. Once the clustering is done, live conversations can be correlated in real time with the categorized and sorted voice files. Voci’s proprietary automated speaker clustering system technology will associate individual speakers to audio without requiring speaker registration. Targeted applications include identifying individuals based on voice for national security and business intelligence applications . . . Voci’s advanced SID system uses techniques based on acoustic tags that are uniquely associated with every speaker, similar to other biometric identifiers such as fingerprint and iris recognition. It enables the tagging of each speaker in a large database of conversations without the speaker having to initiate a connection between their name and their voice.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/industry-news/i/9328/).
My Take
This announcement caught my attention for a number of reasons. First, it comes to of no surprise that the Federal Government is awarding this contract, obviously. But it totally surprised me that they are awarding it for a Voice Biometrics application. Most of the stuff I have written about has been about the awarding of live scan/Fingerprint and Iris Recognition/Vein Pattern Recognition kinds of apps. So, it is refreshing to see such a huge contract being awarded for a Behavioral Biometric.
Second, most applications dealing with Voice Biometrics are that on a commercial scale. Meaning, private sector apps such as financial trading institutions, brokerage firms, and even call centers, where there are a large number of calls being placed in and out of, and people have to verified within just a matter of seconds (or if not, tempers will flare). This is the first time I have seen Voice Biometrics being used in the protection and defense of our homeland. For example, as you can see in the above quote, it will be used primarily for large scale fraud, money laundering, counterfeiting, crime detection, etc.
Third, from my limited experience with Voice Recognition, a subject is asked to recite a few short phrases in order to create the appropriate Biometric Templates, via statistical modeling. So, in just a matter of minutes, all is done. But from what I understand here, this Voice Biometrics solution will take much longer voice and audio recordings in order to create the Biometric Templates. And on top of that, the associated technology seems to be more sophisticated, such as the use of “acoustic tags” so it can be stored and used in massive databases (perhaps even along the scale of AFIS databases). But, this only makes sense, after all, if you are dealing with terrorists and trying to apprehend them, you need to have all of the evidence you can garner, so testimony will be upheld in a court of law.
But this Biometrics solution will also have its fair share in the commercial sector as well, such as business intelligence and CRM applications. As the War on Terrorism is supposed to be a covert and suttle one, it has been far from that, with huge military and political miscalculations from the previous administration. Now, with the emergence of Voice Recognition on the battlefield, perhaps a relatively known Biometric Technology can make this war a much more silent one, with positive results.
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