/ 28 May 2004

‘Screen your calls for deception’

A Thai software company claims to have created a programme for Nokia cellphones that can tell whether a caller is telling the truth or not.

The controversial programme, created by Agilemobile.com, is available for free downloading on the company’s website and can be easily installed on some of the relatively common garden-variety Nokia cellphones. The ‘lie-detector” works on the Nokia 7650, 3650 and 3660 models. It uses the ability of these phones to record a conversation, which is then analysed to provide the cellphone user with a visual sound wave of the caller’s voice.

Agilemobile.com spokesperson Seth Warshavsky says the programme uses ‘voice stress analysis technology”. The company markets the lie detector under the slogan ‘Never be lied to again, screen your calls for deception”.

‘Agile Lie Detector measures the amount of stress caused by lying in a person’s voice and displays this information in a graph in real-time [on your phone] — the lie detector is only effective if used properly by measuring the subject’s voice stress level for a period of time of normal conversation before asking the intended question,” says Warshavsky.

He claims the company’s lie-detector is ‘fairly accurate”.

However, technology analyst Arthur Goldstuck warns that voice stress analysis is a ‘highly dubious form of monitoring other people’s honesty” from a technical point of view, because it requires a trained user and specific circumstances to yield accurate results.

Goldstuck says the concept is fairly well-established, and has been available as a PC software package connected to a phone since the late 1990s.

‘Ultimately, it is designed to measure stress in someone’s voice, and that is exactly what you are measuring: the stress levels of their voice, not the truth levels of their statements.”

Warshavsky does, however, emphasise his programme is for ‘entertainment”, not for ‘covert” purposes. He says cellphone users must disclose to subjects that they are being submitted to an honesty test. Failing to do so is a violation of the terms of use of the software and may be against the law.