South Africa: Intelleca awarded voice biometrics contract

Intelleca, a division of the Bytes Technology Group, has been awarded a voice biometrics deployment contract for one of South Africa’s leading network operators. This adds to the company’s domination of the local voice biometrics market, following its deployment of similar solutions for a number of top local banks.

The network operator plans to implement the solution across a range of business areas in its contact center. Subscribers will be requested to enroll their voiceprint, ensuring they can be automatically identified and verified when they transact via the call center, and substantially reduce the possibility of fraud.

Traditionally, call centers rely on caller line identification (CLI) to identify callers. To enhance security, customers are usually asked a number of random questions related to the personal information the call center has at hand.

“This is time-consuming and costly for both the organization and the customer,” says Shaun Cochrane, director at Intelleca. “Bear in mind that this process takes around two minutes, and costs between R8 and R20 per verification over millions of calls. Intelleca’s voice biometrics solution reduces talk time, and therefore, call costs, enhances the customer experience, and allows the network operator’s call center staff to focus on doing business rather than authenticating callers. In addition, it will vastly enhance security by ensuring callers are who they claim to be.”

The contract was awarded to Intelleca following extensive technology and product evaluation. The deal clincher was the extensive IP that Intelleca has amassed to enhance the Nuance Verifier solution for local conditions — making it one of the most advanced voice authentication software solutions in the world, backed by extensive local expertise, experience, and services.

Intelleca built its own core products and IP on top of the underlying technology, which improves the overall performance of the system, which has been architected to scale out to an entire subscriber base. “It was a shootout between us and an overseas supplier,” says Carlos Gonçalves, Intelleca’s CTO. “We won the contract because we could offer a top product, extensive deployment experience, and our own range of software that Intelleca has developed to address many of the practical requirements of a successful voice biometrics solution.”

Nuance’s voice authentication software enables businesses to provide secure access to sensitive information over the telephone. It creates individual voiceprints to authenticate callers and customers with just their voices, enabling secure access to information. Onto the underlying Nuance engine, Intelleca added:

• SV Web, a technology that allows for the management, configuration, and administration of users and optimizes Nuance
• Intelleca’s own technology that allows user threshold levels to be individually classified based on their personal voice characteristics, and identifies and blacklists potential impostors
• Cross-Channel Management, Intelleca’s software that manages the complexities of users using multiple channels (fixed or mobile) to enroll and verify them
• Voice Quality Detection and Management, software that detects the quality, sound levels, and background noise levels of utterances to build a discrete database of enrollment voiceprints

“Speaker recognition technology is used mainly to verify whether an unknown voice is from a particular enrolled speaker, rather than to identify the speaker,” says Gonçalves. “It’s an application designed to be used in areas where it’s necessary to secure transactions or any type of interaction by identifying or authenticating the person making the call. The solution developed for our client is based on scenarios with co-operative callers who are enrolled in the system, repeating prompted phrases from a small vocabulary.”

Cochrane says voice biometrics is well suited for phone-based business channels because speech is a natural way to communicate and is not considered threatening by users. In addition, the phone is a ubiquitous and familiar device. “Callers generally don’t mind providing a speech sample for authentication, and they don’t regard it as intrusive,” he adds.

The network operator chose not to have its customers register though an IVR system; instead, it opted for the human touch. Its agents ask callers if they would like to be enrolled into the speaker verification system and the benefits of added security levels are explained to them. If the customer agrees, only then are they transferred to an IVR system, which enrolls them; if they refuse, they are placed on an exemption list and will not be asked to enroll again.

“Voice biometrics solutions are perfect for any environment in which a caller’s identity needs to be verified,” notes Gonçalves. “Our customers are using it for telephone banking, corporate banking, insurance applications, password reset and health insurance applications.”