America’s national maritime security authority is looking into using voice biometrics to thwart prank calls, reports The Verge.
It’s a serious issue for the National Coast Guard, which reports that fake distress calls can occur on a daily basis, wasting time and resources for the authority, which must investigate each call. Because it receives such distress calls through a radio channel, it isn’t possible to track down callers as it is with fraudulent 911 calls.
Of course, without a database of voice profiles against which to compare callers, voice biometrics won’t help the Coast Guard to identify pranksters anyway. But it could allow the authorities to flag the voice of a hoaxer, and to ignore subsequent calls from that same voice; a useful countermeasure, since the Coast Guard believes that only a handful of people are making most of the fake calls.
Still, the relatively short duration of distress calls poses a technical obstacle. As The Verge’s Russell Brandom notes, even sophisticated voice identification systems like those of Nuance Communications require around 40-45 seconds to establish a voice profile, whereas some distress calls can consist simply of “Mayday.” So the agency is still in the market for a technological solution that could overcome that issue as it continues to try to hunt down its prank callers.
Source: The Verge
—
April 27, 2017 – by Alex Perala
Follow Us