Nuance launches Nuance Forensics for law enforcement investigations

Nuance Communications has just announced the release of Nuance Forensics, a voice biometrics solution that assists law enforcement officials and forensic experts with criminal investigations, as well as with the prosecution and defense of suspects.

According to the company, the new tool uses Nuance’s patented voice biometrics technology to assist in confirming or denying the identity of individuals based on audio files that are used during investigations. Unlike less precise identification techniques, such as a lineup, wherein suspects are identified based on a witness’ visual memory, voice biometrics delivers accurate and unique identifying characteristics, akin to DNA and fingerprint evidence, to help assist investigations.

“Nuance Forensics is truly transformative technology for law enforcement officials and forensic experts. They now have a powerful tool to assess voice evidence,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager for the Nuance Enterprise Division. “Built upon proven, patented voice biometric technologies that are used worldwide, Nuance Forensics makes it easier to work with audio evidence during investigations as well as in court, and will allow officials to spend more time focusing their energies on what they do best – preventing and prosecuting criminal activity. Just as importantly, the same technologies will ensure that innocent people are effectively cleared of wrongdoing through empirical and accurate analysis of voice evidence.”

Nuance Forensics pinpoints the conversations of interest by filtering out from the audio recordings those that do not include the suspect’s voice, accelerating the investigations and allowing law enforcement to focus on protecting citizens and fighting crime. Specifically, the new system uses reliable voice biometric technology to analyze audio evidence for the purposes of prosecution or defense of a suspect. Forensic experts, who once had to rely solely on the manual analysis of voice evidence, can now use voice biometric technology to accurately analyze these recorded voices entered into evidence. The data obtained through this forensics analysis with voice biometrics includes comprehensive and forensic standards-based reports, such as log likelihood ratios and tippet plots, to empirically establish the strength of the audio evidence in court.

Beyond voice biometric algorithms, Nuance Forensics is also equipped with algorithms to automatically identify dialect and language spoken in a recording, as well as the gender of the speaker. These capabilities enable investigators to identify relevant conversations without the need for scarce language interpreters or manual review of countless hours of recordings.

Nuance Forensics was developed in close collaboration with leading forensic labs.

Reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, U.S. Bank recently piloted voice biometric software from Nuance. Under this particular pilot program credit card customers will use their voice to login with spoken passphrases to access account balances, search trasnactions and make a payment on their account in the mobile app.

Article Topics

forensics  |  law enforcement  |  Nuance Communications  |  voice