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Russian ATM Knows When You Lie
This Russian ATM knows pravda when it hears it; it has built-in voice-analysis software to tell whether or not you are lying. It also scans your passport, records fingerprints and takes a three-dimensional scan for face recognition.
(Russian ATM, the KGB's new best friend)
Dmitri V. Dyrmovsky, director of the center’s Moscow offices, said the new system was designed in part by sampling Russian law enforcement databases of recorded voices of people found to be lying during police interrogations.The big bank involved, Sberbank, whose majority owner is the Russian government, said it intended to install the new machines in malls and bank branches around the country eventually, but had not yet scheduled the rollout. Technology consultants say the machines, if they go into commercial use, would be the banking world’s first use of voice analysis in A.T.M.’s.
While Sberbank’s technology might strike Westerners as too intrusive, many Russians already assume the government can watch or listen to them when it chooses to. Sberbank executives said the new A.T.M.’s would adhere to Russian privacy laws.
I usually reference HAL 9000 from Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey for machines that are sensitive to human emotional states; HAL could tell from 'voice harmonics'.
However, I think I'll also mention the ATM with an attitude from William Gibson's 1999 novel All Tomorrow's Parties:
"Identify yourself, please." Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice, a weird, uptight, strangled little castrato voice … probably kept people from standing around, [talking] with it… If you seriously tried to dick with one, drive a crowbar into the money slot, say, the thing would mist you and itself down with water and then electrify itself.
(Read more about the Lucky Dragon ATM)
Via NYTimes.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/8/2011)
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