{"id":1407,"date":"2023-10-24T03:59:21","date_gmt":"2023-10-23T19:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/2023\/10\/24\/china-moves-to-expand-into-voice-recognition\/"},"modified":"2024-06-30T20:02:35","modified_gmt":"2024-06-30T12:02:35","slug":"china-moves-to-expand-into-voice-recognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/china-moves-to-expand-into-voice-recognition\/","title":{"rendered":"China Moves to Expand into Voice Recognition"},"content":{"rendered":"

In China, officials and companies have deployed facial-recognition technology to a degree uncommon elsewhere, both commercially and\u2014more controversially\u2014for widespread surveillance. Now it\u2019s the turn of voice recognition<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In China, officials and companies have deployed facial-recognition technology to a degree uncommon elsewhere, both commercially and\u2014more controversially\u2014for widespread surveillance. Now it\u2019s the turn of voice recognition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"voice<\/p>\n

Facial recognition is already widespread. China’s next step is voice recognition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Image: Washington Post<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The government of the southwestern Guizhou province, Tsinghua University, and Beijing-based d-Ear Technologies announced\u00a0they are collaborating\u00a0on a pilot project that will link unique voice features to people\u2019s national ID information\u00a0and create, maintain, and secure a database of \u201cvoiceprints.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

China\u2019s digitally-connected population has enabled the government to track people in many forms, such as using facial recognition to\u00a0prevent toilet paper theft\u00a0and\u00a0jaywalking. But\u00a0d-Ear\u00a0and other companies say\u00a0that voice recognition is a better and cheaper way to verify identity. Cheng Ge, marketing<\/a> director of d-Ear, founded in 2002, told Quartz this week that the d-Ear pilot would be similar to social media<\/a> giant Tencent\u2019s December pilot program in the southern city of Guangzhou, which allowed people to use facial recognition within its all-purpose\u00a0WeChat app to create a digital version\u00a0of their government-issued ID card. They could then use the digital ID for hotel check-ins and airport security checks, among other things.<\/p>\n

While the WeChat pilot took place in Guangzhou, at the forefront of\u00a0public\u00a0use of facial recognition, Guizhou will be the pilot province for voice recognition before a possible larger-scale application, said Cheng. The company this month began building a data center to store voice data in Guizhou, a province that is increasingly positioning itself as a tech hub. It\u2019s home, for example, to Apple\u2019s first China data center, where a data storage firm\u00a0established by the local government\u00a0will manage local users\u2019 iCloud data.<\/p>\n

Other Chinese companies have also been testing out voice identification. In December, Alibaba, China\u2019s largest e-commerce company, announced<\/a> that it was working to install voice-recognition technology\u00a0in ticket machines\u00a0for all metro stations in Shanghai to verify commuters\u2019 identities. One of the biggest players in the field, iFlytek, provides\u00a0voice signatures for medical information\u00a0in eastern Anhui\u2014and also provides voice-recognition services for\u00a0police bureaus in Xinjiang. Outside China, as of 2014, government and corporate databases had stored\u00a0some 65 million voiceprints, the Associated Press reported that year.<\/p>\n

\"voice<\/p>\n

While convenient, these sorts of uses of biometric technology raise concerns about the trade-off with privacy. It seems a natural corollary that any biometric identification technology could eventually be used in surveillance in China, though Cheng says the company is only looking at self-verification uses, for example, social security access, hotel check-in, and train ticket purchases.<\/p>\n

Cheng says his company has to work with the government because of the \u201csensitive nature\u201d of biometric\u00a0data,\u00a0and says that the voice data belongs to users\u2014but companies and government entities could have access to it \u201cfor specific business purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In China, officials and companies have deployed facial-recognition technology to a degree uncommon elsewhere, both commercially and\u2014more controversially\u2014for widespread surveillance. Now it\u2019s the turn of voice recognition. In China, officials …","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11696,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[60,353,306,29,34,559,27,54,30,826,214,1040],"class_list":["post-1407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-china","tag-e-china-cities","tag-hiredchina","tag-jobs","tag-jobs-in-china","tag-marketing","tag-news","tag-sales-manager","tag-shopping","tag-social-media","tag-travel","tag-voice-recognition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11698,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions\/11698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}