The New York Times reports on voice recognition technology developed by Nuance Communications. Going beyond dictation, the new technology can extract meaning from and respond to human voice commands and, in addition to computers, could be featured in common household appliances. Privacy advocates worry that the biometric identifier will leave a digital trail for more data mining. The company says its system recognizes individuals' voices by unique codes, not by consumers' names, and its privacy policy states that it only uses consumers' voice data to improve its internal systems. The FTC's David Vladeck said, "Just as we are concerned about the possible applications of facial recognition, there are other forms of biometric identification, like voice, that pose the same kind of problems." (Registration may be required to access this story.)
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