Voice biometrics gaining acceptance

At a recent bankers’ conference in the United States, Sydney, Australia-based speech application company VeCommerce presented delegates with a challenge: Fool our voice biometric technology and win $1,000. No one did, vindicating the company’s claim that the technology is robust enough to be deployed in multi-factor authentication for applications such as online banking. According to Steve Lewis, general manager business consulting for VeCommerce, while deployments of voice biometric technology have to date been fairly limited, that is set to change. “We are a the cusp of seeing some major deployments. We are in the process of developing a system for a top tier financial services organization in Australia which will roll out at the end of this year. That will be a very large scale deployment…Two of the others are looking at similar solutions: once one goes the others will follow.”

Lewis said the banks were interested particularly in applying the technology to Internet banking. “There is so much phishing going on that people are getting nervous about the security of their passwords. A number of banks secure now their transactions through SMS tokens — they send a one time password to your mobile phone. Our product allows the bank to generate a phone call to your mobile phone then it compares your voice to a stored profile.” VeCommerce suggests that a voice profile eliminates the need for remembering identifiers such as PINs, passwords, mother’s maiden name, or for having special equipment such as PIN pads or fobs. Also, in situations where callers are required to identify themselves to a call center operator, it avoids the caller having to provide information such as account number, date of birth, etc which could easily be stolen and used in subsequent identity fraud. According to Lewis, “the technology has been mature for four or five years, but it is just starting to see a lot of use…[However] there have been a number of early adopters, including Australian Health Management, a small health management company in Wollongong with about a 60 seat all centre. We put a system in there about two years ago.”

He said that “The first reason they started talking to us was to increase efficiency: to streamline the none value add part of the interaction: what’s your policy number - what’s your date of birth, what do you want to do? - that are needed before the operator can get to the value add part of the conversation.” Now, you say you membership number and the system goes away and checks that against the stored profile. They are saving about 30 seconds on every phone call.” Lewis added that pay TV operator, Austar, was also using voice biometric technology for customers ordering movies on demand. “People don’t want their kids calling up and ordering all sorts of movies.” St George Bank also uses it to identify callers to its internal help desk.

VeCommerce offers an online demonstration of how its technology, operates. Visitors can register their own voice profile and then use it to authenticate the “transfer” of funds to a mock banking site.