Emerging Technologies

How to catch a criminal using only milliseconds of audio

Scientists can tell far more about you from your recorded voice than you might think

Scientists can tell far more from your recorded voice than you might think Image: Pixabay

Simon Brandon
Writer, Forum Agenda
This article is part of: World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

A prankster who made repeated hoax distress calls to the US Coast Guard over the course of 2014 probably thought they were untouchable. They left no fingerprints or DNA evidence behind, and made sure their calls were too brief to allow investigators to triangulate their location.

Unfortunately for this hoaxer, however, voice analysis powered by AI is now so advanced that it can reveal far more about you than a mere fingerprint. By using powerful technology to analyse recorded speech, scientists today can make confident predictions about everything from the speaker’s physical characteristics - their height, weight, facial structure and age, for example - to their socioeconomic background, level of income and even the state of their physical and mental health.

One of the leading scientists in this field is Rita Singh of Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. When the US Coast Guard sent her recordings of the 2014 hoax calls, Singh had already been working in voice recognition for 20 years. “They said, ‘Tell us what you can’,” she told the Women in Tech Show podcast earlier this year. “That’s when I started looking beyond the signal. How much could I tell the Coast Guard about this person?”

Rita Singh is an expert in speech recognition

What your voice says about you

The techniques developed by Singh and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon analyse and compare tiny differences, imperceptible to the human ear, in how individuals articulate speech. They then break recorded speech down into tiny snippets of audio, milliseconds in duration, and use AI techniques to comb through these snippets looking for unique identifiers.

Your voice can give away plenty of environmental information, too. For example, the technology can guess the size of the room in which someone is speaking, whether it has windows and even what its walls are made of. Even more impressively, perhaps, the AI can detect signatures left in the recording by fluctuations in the local electrical grid, and can then match these to specific databases to give a very good idea of the caller’s physical location and the exact time of day they picked up the phone.

This all applies to a lot more than hoax calls, of course. Federal criminal cases from harassment to child abuse have been helped by this relatively recent technology. "Perpetrators in voice-based cases have been found, have confessed, and their confessions have largely corroborated our analyses," says Singh.

Portraits in 3D

And they're just getting started: Singh and her fellow researchers are developing new technologies that can provide the police with a 3D visual portrait of a suspect, based only on a voice recording. "Audio can us give a facial sketch of a speaker, as well as their height, weight, race, age and level of intoxication," she says.

But there's some way to go before voice-based profiling technology of this kind becomes viable in a court. Singh explains: "In terms of admissibility, there will be questions. We're kind of where we were with DNA in 1987, when the first DNA-based conviction took place in the United States."

This has all proved to be bad news for the Coast Guard’s unsuspecting hoaxer. Making prank calls to emergency services in the US is regarded as a federal crime, punishable by hefty fines and several years of jail time; and usually the calls themselves are the only evidence available. Singh was able to produce a profile that helped the Coast Guard to eliminate false leads and identify a suspect, who they hope to bring a prosecution soon.

Given the current exponential rate of technological advancement, it’s safe to say this technology will become much more widely used by law enforcement in the future. And for any potential hoax callers reading this: it’s probably best to stick to the old cut-out newsprint and glue method for now. Just don’t leave any fingerprints.

Have you read?
Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

Sign up for free

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Stay up to date:

Innovation

Related topics:
Emerging TechnologiesFourth Industrial Revolution
Share:
The Big Picture
Explore and monitor how Innovation is affecting economies, industries and global issues
A hand holding a looking glass by a lake
Crowdsource Innovation
Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale
World Economic Forum logo
Global Agenda

The Agenda Weekly

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

Subscribe today

You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in our emails. For more details, review our privacy policy.

AI at work: A practical guide to implementing and scaling new tools

David Elliott

November 25, 2024

Generative AI and the workforce: 10 big trends we're seeing right now

About us

Engage with us

  • Sign in
  • Partner with us
  • Become a member
  • Sign up for our press releases
  • Subscribe to our newsletters
  • Contact us

Quick links

Language editions

Privacy Policy & Terms of Service

Sitemap

© 2024 World Economic Forum