Germany to use voice recognition to identify refugee origins

The software, based on voice authentication tech used by banks and insurance, is designed to analyze the dialects of refugees based on speech samples. That indicator can then be used to help authorities figure out if the person comes form a particularly war-torn area and is thus truly in need of asylum. Experts are concerned about the accuracy of the software and that potential immigrants could be coached to game it. "I don't see how automated software can distinguish whether a person uses a certain word or pronounces it in a particular way because this is part of their own repertoire or because they were primed to do so by the interviewer or interpreter," University of Essex linguistics Professor Monika Schmid told Deutsch Welle. Instead, she believes the job is best left to BAMF's 45 linguistics experts, who cover 80 languages and have done such work since 1998.