

Law enforcement to identify and store millions of voices via biometric software - DocFeind
http://blogs.computerworld.com/privacy/21051/law-enforcement-identify-store-millions-voices-russian-biometric-software

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ChuckMcM
Makes one wonder. I can see how marketers might use that technology to
recognize that you were the person who called in asking about availability of
a product. If they could that would give them a way to match up voice offers
over the phone with purchases in a store. I could see companies paying for a
service like that.

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gue5t
Is this satire?

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ChuckMcM
Sadly it is not. If any of your business / startup plans revolve around
advertising know that the one thing that makes or breaks it are analytics.
This was Google's strange gift to the world, you could advertise and know
exactly how many times it was 'clicked on.' The history of advertising is
filled with ways in which advertising is 'scored' so magazines have "number of
subscribers" and TV shows have "number of viewers" and radio "number of
listeners", the internet has "number of clicks" (or sometimes "impressions").
But the challenge is that the advertiser wants to know "How much business did
I generate spending this much money?" that feedback loop which so much more
precise in a digital world than in the analog world is like a heroin drip.
Disruptions in the advertising space are lucrative, to swing the trough of
advertising dollars away from Google and into your pocket, you need a way to
provide some sort of verifiable metric of effectiveness, give the advertisers
something to feed into their A/B test harnesses, the closer to 'real' it is
the more you can sell it for.

Stores don't answer phones, you get pre-recorded messages of their hours and a
voice menu. Perhaps you get to a human eventually but the store doesn't know
if you're price shopping around or serious about coming in. They try, they do
things like "We'll hold it for you but you have to come in in the next hour or
so." Or "We can't guarantee that price very long will you be coming in today?"
etc. They have no idea how much money they make or lose from phone support,
its "unknowable" because its not technically feasible to connect a phone call
to a purchase. No analytics.

So having a voice recognition system that you could use to tag potential
customers and match them with actual customers would close the loop. It would
give them analytics on something that was invisible to them today. They would
pay your company to give them that capability because they would use it to
increase sales far more than they paid you for the system.

I just thought another way they could use it is to 'tag' people at the store
and then when you called in if you were a known customer it might put you
right to a real person. You would see a more positive experience, they would
invest in that experience because they already know you are a customer.

There is money on that table. I assure you that someone will reach out and
pick it up.

