Speaker identification technology can help rapidly identify suspects’ voices and isolate conversations of interest in a wide range of law enforcement cases, such as match-fixing, ransom or terrorist calls.
To help the law enforcement community to identify the voices of unknown individuals, INTERPOL participated in a research project that developed a new technology. The SIIP project was conducted by an international consortium of 19 partners comprising end-users, industry and academia, and ran from 2014 to 2018.
The project contributed to identifying criminals and terrorists through the development of a speaker identification engine able to run on different sources including the Internet, via social media, or fixed and mobile telephones in lawful interceptions.
In addition to voice recognition, the SIIP system helps identify gender, age, language and accent, and detect voice cloning.
In the future, speaker identification could be combined with other biometric technologies such as fingerprint and facial recognition and thereby facilitate checks against all related databases.
Data protection
The SIIP project explored the operational, technical, forensic, legal and ethical perspectives related to the evolving field of speaker identification.
INTERPOL’s role was to ensure the technology meets the operational needs and requirements defined by the law enforcement community in its member countries.
This encompassed in particular on the legal aspects of the technology, to ensure its compatibility with existing national legislations and respect of privacy and data protection laws, including INTERPOL’s Rules on the Processing of Data.
Funding
This project received funding under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. 607784.