Voice biometrics help detect Euro terror plot

warned that there was no scientific way of identifying a person’s voice with absolute certainty.

Frederic Bimbot, one of the paper’s authors, said the term “voiceprinting” was a misnomer because it suggested that the technique was as reliable as fingerprinting. “This is absolutely not the case,” his paper said, noting that, unlike a persons’ prints, voices are highly variable — changing according to age, health, and emotional state. AP contacted him by e-mail late Monday, and he said his opinion had not changed.

Voices can also be altered voluntarily, he said, adding that, at present the technology was simply “not mature enough to enable definite conclusions of any kind.”

Whatever its reliability, voice biometrics have drawn considerable interest from governments around the world. Only a month after the 9/11 terror attacks, the Pentagon identified voiceprints as one of the dozens of priority areas in research and development, and it has been used in the field since the invasion of Iraq, according to former U.S. officials, who spoke condition of anonymity to describe classified technology.

Interpol is also interested in voice biometrics, the head of its fingerprint unit told AP. Mark Branchflower, head of Interpol’s fingerprint unit, said voice samples could be stored and shared with Interpol’s 188 member countries via its secure global communications network.

The private sector has already embraced the technology, with U.S. probation officers using it to monitor offenders, and Canadian call centers using it to identify customers. Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, says it has been using voice biometrics for the past decade to deter fraud and boost customer safety.

AP quotes experts to say that the technology has strong potential for streamlining intelligence operations. U.S. and British intelligence run an international eavesdropping program that gathers huge amounts of information. So big is the overload that the National Security Agency (NSA) is building a massive storage center in Utah to handle the mountains of data.

Almog Aley-Raz, whose Israel-based company PerSay Ltd. supplies governments and businesses around the world (“PerSay in strategic partnership with INS Indriya in Singapore,” 24 February 2009 HSNW; and “CaTS, PerSay collaborate on voice recognition,” 2 September 2008 HSNW), said that using voice biometrics could allow officials to scan a large number of phone conversations for a several suspects’ voices, greatly streamlining intelligence work. “An entry-level server enables you to run 100 streams of audio against maybe 100 voiceprints,” he said, noting that in some cases dozens or even hundreds of servers could be run back-to-back to comb through intercepted calls.

Aley-Raz accepted that the technology had its flaws — it is vulnerable to background noise and poor audio quality, for example, and can become confused when people start talking over one another.

“It’s just another tool,” he said — but one that can point terror-hunters in the right direction.