ATM detects lies

Russia’s biggest retail bank has invented an ATM machine with a built-in lie detector in order to curb the growing menace of consumer credit fraud. The ATM can easily pass off as a part of KGB’s ultra- modern and secretive operational tool. Other than the rather unusual inclusion of a passport scanner, fingerprint recorder and a 3-dimensional facial recognition, the machine is equipped with advanced voice-analysis software.

Developed by Speech Technology Center, this software helps analyze if the person is truthful enough while he answers questions like, “At this moment, do you have any other outstanding loans?” and “Are you employed?”. Speech Technology Center has a repertoire of elite clients like the Russian domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, a legacy of erstwhile Soviet K.G.B. According to the director of the center, Dmitri V. Dyrmovsky, the new system has been designed by collecting and sampling all the recorded voices of people found lying during police interrogations. The bank in question is Sberbank, which intends to install these new machines in malls and its branches all across the country.

According to technology specialists, this would be an entirely new experiment, with no previous recorded use of speech recognition in an ATM. The technology may sound a little too offensive to privacy-lovers, but it hardly makes any difference since majority of the Russians already have an impression that the government has full access to their private lives. According to an executive at Sberbank, these ATMs completely adhere to the Russian privacy laws.

Turning the ATM into a lie-detecting machine is certainly a new phenomenon, which if goes well, would change the way transactions take place. For those who want to have a glimpse of the future, a prototype of the machine is on display at Sberbank’s Branch of the Future laboratory.

Via Gizmowatch