MAVIS History
MAVIS - Multiple Application Voice Identification System
ASTL’s founder, Glenn Lacey, studied in the emerging fields of Biometrics and Artificial Intelligence and in the early 1980s, as a consultant , worked with a Research & Development Team at Marconi Defence Systems developing a trials system called the AST1000, the world’s first airborne Speech Recognition System (SRS) to control and fly an aircraft. (Note: Speech Recognition refers to the systems ability to recognise the words Spoken not the Speaker)
The AST1000 project not only provided Glenn with a solid foundation and understanding of speech recognition processing and techniques it also helped him clearly understand the limitations of such system’s and innovate him.
Independent Research and Experiments began soon after, progress being driven by the commercial availability of key hardware components such as Digital Signal Processors (DSP’s) which made it possible to do complex mathematical equations fast, Automatic Gain Controllers (AGC’s) that uniformly controlled the amplitude of the speech input whether spoken loudly or softly and finally Analogue to Digital Converters (ADC’s) that converted the actual speech into a digital format so it could be processed.
Glenn’s concepts, theory and algorithms were proven over several years.
Large scale testing took place in the mid 1990’s and was the equivalent of five thousand people being pre registered onto a database with the same password with each individual then being randomly identified from an independent LIVE repetition of the same password.
The False Negative / False Positive success rate of this test was unprecedented for this type of trial at the time, even today, given that the system was randomly identifying individuals ALL using the same password.
For one to one identification applications, the False Negative / False Positive is further enhanced and remains unprecedented, making MAVIS ideal for applications where the highest authentication accuracy is demanded.
In September 2007 ASTL was formed to develop and market Glenn’s concepts and research for use on today’s Mobile Phones, SIM Card Technology, Laptops, Netbooks, PC and Server platforms, after re-affirming the market leading performance of the system.