The NSA transforms audio text conversations for better … – Le Figaro

In ten years, NSA has made huge strides in speech recognition. Its programs can now transcribe, archive and index audio conversations as text.

The NSA capacity for voice recognition is enough Siri and Cortana make jealous, assistants of the iPhone and Windows Phone. According to the revelations of the site The Intercept, which the NSA access to archives provided by Edward Snowden, the American intelligence programs are more effective than those of the giants of Silicon Valley.

It was already known NSA can record all the phone calls of a country. And according to the alert pitcher William Binney, who left the NSA in 2001, the agency recorded 80% of past audio calls worldwide. What makes her say that she is “overloaded” data and unable to sort out this massive collective.

According to new documents analyzed by The Intercept, the former employer of William Binney has made rapid progress in speech recognition since his departure. The NSA automated programs can transcribe telephone conversations as text, classify and index them for searching by keywords among all these transcripts. The objective of the agency “. One analyst to sort million conversations a day to focus on the few of them that matter” allow

These innovations are the result of work long. DARPA, the research and development division of the US Army, has been investing for 70 years in academic and commercial research in speech recognition. These programs have supported US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Latin America, where the army has several bases and fight against drug trafficking.

Experts interviewed by The Intercept on the consequences of these revelations will see the end of the voice as a fashion fleeting conversation. Because in addition to transcribe and index the conversations, the NSA programs predict the interest they may have for analysts based on other conversations in which they were interested, like the system of recommendations of Amazon. An operation which makes it totally opaque to the criteria for an individual under surveillance.