Artificial intelligence has helped detect secret code words used by inmates on prison phone calls

A US prison was recently able to detect and prevent inmates from carrying out illegal business by using artificial intelligence to analyse calls made into and out of the prison for unusual patterns. All calls that connect on prison phone lines in the US are recorded and monitored, but it is a very time-consuming and boring job to listen endlessly to thousands of hours of conversations between inmates and their families in order to try to work out if anything nefarious is going on. To speed the job up, one prison in the American mid-west is using a machine learning system designed by London-based firm Intelligent Voice to listen to all the audio files and detect odd patterns for humans to take a closer look at, according to New Scientist. When the prison wardens looked at the analysis report created by the software, they discovered that one of the most popular non-trivial phrases being used by inmates was the phrase "three way". Initially the wardens thought that the phrase was some sort of sexual reference, but because the word was used so often in phone calls they investigated further, and realised that the phrase was actually a secret code word.