Another Biometric Marker…
Posted by Tom Fuller in Blindside project, people and passwords at July 24th, 2007
…is your voiceprint. This article in the Economist seems half smoke (how could a company have voiceprint software that is fit for purpose and not have voice recognition for numbers?) but half-exciting. Comments from those more expert?
July 24th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Voiceprint matching is an entirely different problem from voice recognition. The former is about one-to-one matching of the characteristics of a captured soundwave with a physical model of an individual’s biological voice apparatus (which is very hard to ‘forge’ and therefore potentially a useful biometric), whereas voice recognition is about one-to-many matching of many people’s spoken version of a word versus a ‘generic’ version of that word.
You still have to train even quite good voice recognition systems to get them to perform well on broad vocabularies, but there are systems that aren’t too bad at recognising limited sets of words (e.g. numbers spoken over the phone). Each (one hopes) is fit to the specific purpose for which it was designed…
July 31st, 2007 at 11:16 am
Cheers Phil. Hang on; I’m perplexed. Are you the Phil people inside government are too scared to talk to because they seem to think you’re a raving anarchist with extreme views and even a ponytail? Or are you the Phil I know as a perfectly respectable generally law-abiding taxpayer with a lot of useful expert knowledge and a cracking sense of humour and some public sculptures on display in Wales? Are these duplicate identities or are you one and the same person? Hang on; I’d better recalibrate my Weltauffassung…I think my head is about to explode