The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) dropped last week their interest on the Voice Risk Analysis (VRA), based on Nemesysco’s Layerd Voice Analysis (LVA) technology. After extensive tests of Voice Risk Analysis the DWP stated that ”From our findings we cannot conclude that VRA works effectively and consistently in the benefits environment.”( http://www.dwp.gov.uk/local-authority-staff/housing-benefit/security/voice-risk-analysis-vra/).

Of course, the DWP’s conclusion that VRA does not work comes as no surprise and could have been predicted from the mere analysis of the working principles of the LVA-technology described in Nemesysco’s patent: Inferring a speaker’s emotional state from counts based on the number of “thorns” and “plateaus” observed in sample triplets of a sound wave digitized at 11025 samples/second (i.e. sample triplets covering about 272 µs) simply does not make any sense. It is as absurd as scanning a text by counting the number of times that a vowel occurred in between two consonants (“thorns”), counting the number and length of sequences that can be formed by triplets of consecutive characters not further away from each other than, for instance, five steps in the alphabetic sequence (“plateaus”) and using these counts to issue statements on the author’s emotional state. Thus, although the tests were unnecessary, the fact that DWP’s thorough analysis led to the inevitable conclusion that the technology did not work presents yet another strong empirical result in line with the notion that Nemesysco’s LVA-technology lacks plausibility and can only generate unstable and irrelevant outcomes.