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Tackling 'Football Hooliganism' Through Voice Authentication
Editorial Director, CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions
What do you do if you're a small European country plagued by what's known as "football hooliganism," or overzealous soccer fans engaging in obnoxious behavior fueled by adrenaline, nationalism, team spirit, too little education and a blood alcohol level that would drop a Tyrannosaurus? You pass a law encouraging the deployment and use of voice authentication/speaker verification and try to weed out the bad seeds you've encountered before from the stands of future games.
This is exactly what the Netherlands is doing, and the technology is being provided by Tel-Aviv, Israel-based Persay, a spin-off from Verint Systems (www.verint.com). Persay’s system will be deployed in a number of European nations through Elmo-Tech (a subsidiary of Dmatek Ltd.) and operated by ADT Monitoring Services.
The monitoring system assists the police in ensuring that hooligans previously convicted of initiating and participating in violent acts are prevented from attending future soccer games, and that they comply with their detention period. Additionally, since in some parts of Europe individuals brought up on football hooliganism charges are required to notify police that they are home (and not out causing trouble) during matches, the "parolees" can be remotely monitored from their homes during the games. The Dutch police force is notorious for its "widespread use of unconventional means to tackle the ever growing violence at soccer games." The system was chosen following a competitive analysis.
Persay’s technology provides the speech recognition/speaker verification to ElmoTech’s electronic monitoring system presently operating in Holland, designed and implemented to deal with the criminal population. The system is programmed to randomly call the banned fans at home during the soccer games and to verify them by their voiceprint.
(Does this sound serious? It is. Fan violence during football games in some parts of Europe make rowdy American sporting events seem like garden parties with the Queen.)
Aha, you might say, but what about modern telephony features that allow you to forward your home phone to a mobile, or record your voice in advance and have your Mum play it for the monitoring system? That's taken care of, according to Persay. The speaker verification system is designed to work on various telephone networks, independent of language and accent, taking into consideration various environmental scenarios such as background noise and changes in a person’s natural voice patterns. Calls cannot be redirected via “follow-me” to mobile phones and the system is able to successfully detect recording/playback attempts.
As for applications in the U.S., one of Persay’s systems is presently being used by the Department of Homeland Security and is replacing physical attendance with remote attendance in immigration offices for immigrants possessing temporary visas.
Tracey Schelmetic is editorial director for CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions. For more articles by Tracey Schelmetic, please visit the archives.
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