The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is inviting interested vendors to a proposers’ day for its Anonymous Real-Time Speech program.
IARPA said Tuesday the new program is seeking new technologies capable of protecting the identity of consumers whose speech is being recorded on smart devices or by companies for marketing research purposes.
The 36-month effort will explore novel software-based transformational speech technologies to address privacy threats. For instance, new software may be designed to instantaneously alter a speech to prevent its attribution to the original speaker.
IARPA identified artificial intelligence and machine learning assessments of human emotion, speaker identification software and human evaluation of user age and dialect as threats to the privacy of speech owners.
“Anonymity and discretion are vital to the [Intelligence Community’s] mission success, and the ARTS program will give the IC an important new tool to help facilitate mission priorities,” explained Mark Becker, a program manager at IARPA.