Researchers at Stanford Medicine and the University of Toronto conducted a small study of 18 adults aged 21 or over. Participants were given a weight-based dose of alcohol and randomly assigned a series of tongue twisters – one before drinking, and one each hour up to seven hours after drinking.

The participants were asked to read the tongue twister aloud, and a smartphone was placed on a table 1-2ft away to record their voices.

Researchers also measured their breath alcohol concentration at the beginning of the study and every 30 minutes for up to seven hours. They used digital programs to isolate the speaker’s voices, broke them into one-second increments and analysed measures such as frequency and pitch.

When checked against breath alcohol results, changes in the participants’ voice patterns as the experiment went on predicted alcohol intoxication with 98 per cent accuracy.

“The accuracy of our model genuinely took me by surprise,” said lead researcher...