Soon you could be caught easily if you fake illness to call in sick at work!

Researchers at the Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology in Surat, India and Germany’s Rhenish University of Applied Science have reportedly developed an AI (artificial intelligence) tool to detect whether someone has a cold by the tone of their voice.

Scientists at the two institutes have developed a method to detect speech signals in a non-invasive manner.

The scientists’ team analysed voice samples of 630 German people, 111 of whom had a cold, and captured variations in the voice spectrum and studied the vocal rhythms found in human speech, according to a Business Insider report based on a feature by The Economist.

The analysis showed that they could effectively classify cold and non-cold speech.

“The proposed features efficiently capture the spectral difference between cold and non-cold speech and can be utilised to automatically diagnose common cold and related disorders,” the researchers said in a study published in science journal ScienceDirect.

The aim of the study was to develop a method that gives higher performance with fewer features to identify a person with a common cold from their speech.

The participants in the study were asked to count from one to 40 and to describe what they did on the weekend, The Economist report said. They were also asked to recite Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun”.

The researchers feel that the feature can help people prevent the spread of viral infections and remotely monitor the health of a person with a common cold.