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@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ If this sounds like a blueprint for intensified surveillance, for even greater c |
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## Thoughtlessness |
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One US company hoping to capitalise on the pandemic sells "voice analytic technologies", which it claims can "vet for fraud, security, and safety risks" with greater than 94% accuracy [website]. All this based on a 2-10 minute long phone call, in which it isn't what you say that matters, but how. Your voice, it is presumed, will betray you. Representation not only can but *should* be bypassed [Andrejevic interview]. Before the pandemic, this company's products were already available in 13 languages across 12 countries and 23 industries, including to government and military contractors. Today, they also offer “automated telephonic vocal risk assessment” for the determination of fraud in allocating Covid-related welfare and stimulus packages. How the system works, what precisely constitutes "vocal risk" and why, is never explained. It is, after all, proprietary. |
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One US company hoping to capitalise on the pandemic sells "voice analytic technologies", which it claims can "vet for fraud, security, and safety risks" with greater than 94% accuracy [website]. All this based on a 2-10 minute long phone call, in which it isn't what you say that matters, but how. Your voice, it is presumed, will betray you. Representation not only can but *should* be bypassed [Andrejevic interview?]. Before the pandemic, this company's products were already available in 13 languages across 12 countries and 23 industries, including to government and military contractors. Today, they also offer “automated telephonic vocal risk assessment” for the determination of fraud in allocating Covid-related welfare and stimulus packages. How the system works, what precisely constitutes "vocal risk" and why, is never explained. It is, after all, proprietary. |
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This kind of digital snake oil isn't just a function of predatory capitalism and gullible investors. It's also a consequence of machine listening's original wager: that silicon ears [Kidel?] might discern what meat ears never could [Wark]; that there is a layer of auditory truth beneath or beyond the threshold of human hearing, and that this can be accessed *only* by machinic systems whose workings, in many cases, cannot be reverse engineered or explained to those same human ears. |
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