 Knowing who is telling the truth and who is telling porkies is
always a tricky affair but our friends at Skype have a little bolt
on extra that claims to help out. As VOIP clients go Skype has taken
to world by storm so much so that Ebay paid a small fortune for the
company allowing its founders to go off and start developing Joost.
Never fear as others have stepped into their boots and continued to
grown the Skype range with little extras like phone call recorders
and now a lie detector.The detector or KishKish to give it its
full name runs as a Skype plug in and is a small (1.7 meg) download
from the Skype website. After a fairly short install process the
KishKish system is ready and sits in the background of Skype ready
to trigger when you make a call. The plug in is integrated with
Skype 3.0 and higher and will take the first 10 seconds of the call
to calibrate using the callers voice.
Once calibrated the pop up KishKish panel swings into life with 1
of four indicators as to the level of stress in the voice. The Skype
system uses VSA or Voice stress analysis to try and tell if the
truth is being spoken, this works on the premise that when under
stress the body has certain physiological traits that result in the
voice rising in pitch and therefore stress level.
So time to put the plugin to the test and first a control call
with a colleague, the first 10 seconds are taken up with KishKish
showing that it is calibrating and then it leaps into lie detection
mode with the needle moving along a representation of graph paper,
this is backed up by large red and green lights and stress level
messages. Our control call contained no untruths and only hit the
red light once. So time for our caller to start telling some porkies,
starting with an incorrect age which KishKish managed to glow red on
immediately, plus further made up personal details again we managed
about a 90% accuracy.
Testing in more complicated conversations and on those with
regional accents dropped the success rate to about 70% and we soon
grew a little tired of the large interface on screen when using
Skype, it would have been better if it integrated within the main
Skype display.
As a free extra for Skype KishKish is worth a try and it is great
fun if not more of a novelty than a serious tool for checking if you
are being told the truth. We doubt you'll find any Police forces
using it or in fact any private investigators but as a bit of fun
for Skype users it can't hurt.
Kishkish.com
Published - 09/04/2007
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