In message <v04210100b46c3822f6c2@[24.218.56.92]>, "Arnold G. Reinhold" writes:
>>In April 1999, a report commissioned by the Parliament's Office of
>>Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA), concluded that
>>"effective voice 'wordspotting' systems do not exist" and "are not in use".
>
> I wonder about the European Parliament. They sometimes make our
> Congress look intelligent. The existence of speech recognition
> technology is hardly a secret. It's been on the market for years, has
> been improving steadily and is now being offered commercially for
> similar applications. I don't know how effective it is right now at
> telephone monitoring, but it will only get better. Here is an excerpt
> from one vendor's web site:
> http://www.dragonsystems.com/products/audiomining/
>
> "New AudioMining Technology Uses Award-Winning Speech Recognition
> Engine to Quickly Capture and Index Information Contained in Recorded
> Video Footage, Radio Broadcasts, Telephone Conversations, Call Center
> Dialogues, Help Desk Recordings, and More
etc.
The problem, from the perspective of an intelligence agency, is figuring out
what to listen to. Let's do some arithmetic.
The product you cite requires at least a 133 Mhz Pentium; 200 Mhz preferred.
How many such chips are needed? Well, according to a map on a wall near my
office (see http://www.telegeography.com/Publications/cmap99.html), there are
currently about 150 Gbps worth of fiber across the Atlantic. That's about 2.7
potential million phone channels. A lot of that is data, of course -- shall
we say 75%? That still leaves us with ~675K simultaneous calls. That's an
awful lot of CPU power, even by NSA's standards.
And it gets worse -- within a year, the FLAG and TAT-14 cables will come
online, adding at least 800 Gbps of capacity...
Tentative conclusion: they need to listen to the signaling channels, so that
they can focus their efforts. *Then* they can do the voice recognition and
pattern-matching tricks.
--Steve Bellovin
