The United States and 70 other nations are investing in voice recognition databases that will allow governments to identify criminals or suspects based on brief recordings.

A leader in the development of “voice-prints” storage is Russia’s Speech Technology Center, known as SpeechPro in the U.S. The company has developed the capability to tuck away millions of recorded voices that governments can later use to identify persons of interests.

The system, called “VoiceGrid Nation,” can match a recording to a database entry in only five seconds (based on a scan of 10,000 voices), with an accuracy of 90%.

Dozens of countries have invested in the company’s biometric technology, with the biggest markets in the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Asia. These include dictatorships, such as those of Belarus and Uzbekistan.

According to Slate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is developing its own voice recognition capability separate from SpeechPro. The National Security Agency also is interested in such technology.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

To Learn More:

Watch Your Tongue: Law Enforcement Speech Recognition System Stores Millions of Voices (by Ryan Gallagher, Slate)

Russian Voice ID Company Would Like to Record You for American Authorities (by Steve Huff, Beta Beat)

Just Business: How Russian Technology Provides the Eyes and Ears for the World’s Big Brothers (by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Agentura.ru)

FBI Biometric (Federal Bureau of Investigation)

FBI Prepares Billion-Dollar Iris Recognition Database (by Matt Bewig, AllGov)