Malvern start-up firm creates technology to fight cyber attacks

A start-up company in Malvern is taking on hackers and people stealing identities, after developing technology designed to make logging on to sites more secure.

FarX, based at the town’s Science Park, has combined voice and facial recognition with artificial intelligence to add extra protection for people accessing sensitive information, and is now being used by the banking industry.

The firm said the more people use the technology, the more the AI learns about them, which helps it to distinguish between the individual and anyone posing as them.

The firm, which set up during the Covid pandemic, has been granted patents in the UK and US.

Founder and director Clive Summerfield, who has 30 years of experience in developing speech recognition technology, said: “This is essentially a class of AI algorithm that we’ve created that learns about each individual.

“The more it sees and hears you, the better it gets at recognising it’s you.

“The better it gets at recognising you, the better it knows when it is actually not you and that’s when it’s a forger or deepfake that’s trying to break the system.”

He said the key thing was a plan to “fuse voice and face recognition together as a unified algorithm”, offering a “much richer way” of authenticating an individual.

Mr Summerfield said the next stage of the algorithm included learning about the user’s emotional state.

“We all learn when people are happy and sad and frustrated and angry and all, so we learn that as humans,” he said, “and the next stage of our algorithm is actually making the system learn about happiness and sadness.

“This becomes incredibly important when we’re starting to put these technologies into things such as automated customer service.

“So the next level of chatbots will be essentially able to discern your voice and your face, and be able to discern that you are actually a happy customer, or you’re a frustrated customer.”