Some of the best minds in voice biometrics began, a little over twenty years ago, to develop the Psychological Stress Evaluator, the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer (CVSA) based on the original technology. Due to the stringent standards that the NITV used to validate their technology, progress on the new forensic voice biometrics system was slow. As the CVSA is now relied upon by thousands of law enforcement agencies, including most major metropolitan police departments, and the US military, this formula paid off. The automatic scoring algorithm utilized by the CVSA took ten years to develop and is known as the “Method for Quantifying Psychological Stress Levels Using Voice Samples” (patent # 7,321,855), was deemed so unique and accurate that it was recently awarded a patent by the US Patent Office.

This all began in 1988, with the introduction of the CVSA to a largely skeptical law enforcement community. However, the CVSA was so successful at every department that acquired it that soon word of this tremendous investigative tool spread from agency to agency. Nearly 1,800 agencies have acquired the system, over the past twenty years, and tens of thousands of crimes have been solved, many of which had gone ‘cold’ and would never have been solved were it not for this unique investigative tool.

The CVSA, with the military’s Special Forces successes in Iraq utilizing the CVSA to obtain actionable intelligence on the battlefield, has drawn the attention of William Shatner’s “Heartbeat of America Award” given to businesses that keep American strong. The show, to be aired on national TV in May, is a prestigious award NITV shares with such esteemed past recipients as “Doctors Without Borders.”

The researchers of a study of the technology, funded by the Department of Justice and conducted by the US Air Force Laboratory, reported their findings to the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The Air Force study found that the technology “is a viable alternative to the polygraph.” Additionally, a “US Special Operations Command Independent Evaluation of the CVSA,” led by a Ph.D. researcher, found that “The majority of the agencies preferred the CVSA to the polygraph.” It also found that most of those agencies had discontinued the use of the polygraph. “This was mostly due to the fact that countermeasures were very effective against the polygraph, the polygraph took so long to conduct, and the results were often inconclusive”, according to Chief Endler.