World’s First Intelligent Audio Masking System is developed at IBM’s India Research Laboratory (IRL) which will automatically detect and masks sensitive information in audio recordings.
The technology is expected to be useful for call center operations which record conversations between call center staff and customers for a number of reasons, including monitoring of service quality.
The technology utilizes a combination of speech analytics and meta data to locate and mask portions of an audio recording during playback to individuals that are not authorized to hear the sensitive information, according to Banavar. The information that is to be masked can be configured depending on the requirement, and the masked portions can be presented in many ways, such as white noise, silence or an announcement that the information has been edited, said Guruduth Banavar, director of IRL, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. Some of these audio recordings are also used to train new staff, he added.
[ IBM develops audio-masking technology ]