The race to fingerprint the human voice

You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence." We have all heard this 1,000 times yet we barely give a thought as to what may happen to all the recordings that the police make of their interviews. Or indeed to the somewhat more mundane equivalent : "This call may be recorded for training purposes."
However, without your permission, your recorded voice may be about to play a key role in the race to fingerprint the human voice. Fuelled by 9/11, spurred on by the advance of our digital society and made possible by raw computing power, the development of increasingly sophisticated automated speaker recognition systems (ASRS) are now bringing the prospect of a "voiceprint" enticingly close. These systems can in as little as 15 minutes use a background population of voices to make a statistical judgement on the significance of any similarity or difference between the voice of the criminal and that of a suspect that could have taken a human 15 hours to complete.
"September 11 was the trigger for this as, after the attacks, the police and intelligence services realised that while there were so many recordings of the voices of the terrorists they didn't have the technology they needed to extract information from them," says Antonio Moreno, the technical director of Agnitio Corp, which provides forensic automated speaker recognition systems to police forces.
The systems were used to identify some of the men behind the Madrid trains bombings of 2004. Although the men wore masks on YouTube, they spoke naturally.
For Professor Peter French, founder of the UK's leading and oldest forensic speech laboratory, JP French Associates, the bugging, recording and identification of people traffickers, drug dealers and terrorists was only the beginning of this revolution. Now, though, the "great quest" is to fingerprint the human voice and "many engineers keep telling me that all they need is more time to tweak the algorithms and they can achieve full accuracy" , French says.
"The ubiquity of mobile phones means that almost the first thing you do if you are attacked is call 999, and as all 999 calls are recorded a lot of people inadvertently record their rape or mugging and capture their attackers' voices," French says. --THE INDEPENDENT