Human Rights Watch said on October 22, 2017, that the Chinese government's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) is collaborating with iFlytek, a Chinese company that produces 80 percent of all speech recognition technology in the country, to develop a pilot surveillance system that can automatically identify targeted voices in phone conversations and has begun collecting “voice pattern” samples of individuals to establish a national voice biometric database. It added that the authorities have stepped up the use of biometric technology in recent years – including the construction of large-scale biometric databases – to bolster its existing mass surveillance and social control efforts. Compared with other biometric databases run by the police, the voice pattern database appears to be less established, with fewer samples in it. By 2015, police had collected 70,000 voice patterns in Anhui province, one of the main pilot provinces identified by the MPS for such collection. In comparison, national police databases have more than one billion faces and 40 million people’s DNA samples. The collection of voice biometrics is part of the Chinese government’s drive to form a “multi-modal” biometric portrait of individuals and to gather ever more data about citizens.