The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet

Summary

Your voice as biometric data, and how marketers are using it to manipulate you

The first in-depth examination of the voice intelligence industry, The Voice Catchers exposes how artificial intelligence is enabling personalized marketing and discrimination through voice analysis. Amazon and Google have numerous patents pertaining to voice profiling, and even now their smart speakers are extracting and using voice prints for identification and more. Customer service centers are already approaching every caller based on what they conclude a caller's voice reveals about that person's emotions, sentiments, and personality, often in real time. In fact, many scientists believe that a person's weight, height, age, and race, not to mention any illnesses they may have, can also be identified from the sound of that individual's voice. Ultimately not only marketers, but also politicians and governments, may use voice profiling to infer personal characteristics for selfish interests and not for the benefit of a citizen or of society as a whole.

Leading communications scholar Joseph Turow places the voice intelligence industry in historical perspective, explores its contemporary developments, and offers a clarion call for regulating this rising surveillance regime.