AI is now so advanced that it can reveal far more about you than a mere fingerprint. By using powerful technology to analyse recorded speech, scientists today can make confident predictions about everything from the speaker’s physical characteristics – their height, weight, facial structure and age, for example – to their socioeconomic background, level of income and even the state of their physical and mental health.

Your voice can give away plenty of environmental information, too. For example, the technology can guess the size of the room in which someone is speaking, whether it has windows and even what its walls are made of. Even more impressively, perhaps, the AI can detect signatures left in the recording by fluctuations in the local electrical grid, and can then match these to specific databases to give a very good idea of the caller’s physical location and the exact time of day they picked up the phone.

One of the leading scientists in this field is Rita Singh of Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. Interview with Ms. Singh