Being that over 60 percent of the million or so migrants seeking asylum in Germany do not have any identification papers on them and are not always “open” about where they actually came from, Germany authorities are planning to use speech analysis technology to help straigten this out and thus speed up the asylum seeking process.

Migrants from Bavaria, for instance, speak a unique dialect of German that natives of, say, Hamburg or Frankfurt find difficult to understand. Berlin migrants, on the other hand, often speak Berlinisch, a metrolect mixture not always well-received in other parts of the country. This voice analysis software will quickly identify these differences and thus enable authorities to send these folks back to the Bundesland (federal state) they came from. For further processing there, I mean.

“I don’t see how automated software can distinguish whether a person uses a certain word or pronounces it in a particular way because this is part of their own repertoire or because they were primed to do so by the interviewer or interpreter.”