Privately first certified for voice biometrics for age estimation to UK regulations

Voice age estimation technology from Switzerland-based Privately SA has been certified by a UK regulator, according to a company announcement.

Privately’s VoiceAssure analyses voice biometric features on the user’s device to estimate age, as CEO and Co-founder Deepak Tewari explained to Biometric Update in a feature interview at the beginning of this year.

Evaluation Assurance Level 1 was granted to the voice-based age estimation technology by the Age Check Certification Scheme.

Tony Allen, CEO of the UK’s certification schemes for Digital Identity, Age Assurance and Age Appropriate Design said the certification is the first of its kind in the world in a LinkedIn post.

An online demo prompts users to read a sentence, and a few seconds later, returns an estimate of whether the subject is over 18 years old, an age confidence score, an estimated gender, and a “genuineness score.”

The UK’s ACCS assessed Privately with accuracy of 100 percent for classifying 13-14 year-olds as minors and people 26 to 27 years old as adults, according to a Medium post by Senior Machine Learning Engineer Onur Yürüten. The company had the same results in internal testing for users who speak languages other than English.

The ACCS has also found Privately’s FaceAssure estimates successfully that people under 18 years old are under 25 95.69 percent of the time.

Article Topics

Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS)  |  age estimation  |  age verification  |  biometrics  |  certification  |  Privately  |  voice analysis  |  voice biometrics