In 1997 the French Acoustical Society issued a public request to end the use of forensic voice science in the courtroom. Indeed, that movie scene exemplifies the so-called “CSI effect”-the “phenomenon in which judges hold unrealistic expectations of the capabilities of forensic science,” says Juana Gil Fernandez, a forensic speech scientist at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (Superior Council of Scientific Investigations) in Madrid, Spain.Ī voice analyst at work in a speech forensics laboratory in Spain. Recent figures published by INTERPOL indicate that half of forensic experts still use audio techniques that have been openly discredited.įor years, movies and television series like CSI paint an unrealistic picture of the “science of voices.” In the 1994 movie Clear and Present Danger an expert listens to a brief recorded utterance and declares that the speaker is “Cuban, aged 35 to 45, educated in the eastern United States.” The recording is then fed to a supercomputer that matches the voice to that of a suspect, concluding that the probability of correct identification “is 90.1 percent.” This sequence sums up a good number of misimpressions about forensic phonetics, which have led to errors in real-life justice. We have compiled two dozens judicial cases from around the world in which forensic phonetics were controversial. Call centers at banks are using voice biometrics to authenticate users and to identify potential fraud.īut is the science behind voice identification sound? Several articles in the scientific literature have warned about the quality of one of its main applications: forensic phonetic expertise in courts. National Security Agency has analyzed and extracted the content of millions of phone conversations. Documents disclosed by Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S.

Examples abound: When ISIS released the video of journalist James Foley being beheaded, experts from all over the world tried to identify the masked terrorist known as Jihadi John by analyzing the sound of his voice. Voice recognition has started to feature prominently in intelligence investigations.

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