Voice biometrics have not yet caught on in the United States

Published 4 September 2009

Canada and Australia are further along than the United States in this regard, mostly because of U.S. critics spreading unnecessary fear and doubt about the technology

Dave Kearns writes in Networkworld that he had a note last week from PR person Melissa Hyland talking about new voice biometrics solutions from Nuance Communications. Since he had not covered the company before, Kearns looked up their management and advisers to see if there were any “old friends” — and he found one. Sitting on Nuance’s Board of Directors is Robert J. Frankenberg, the man best known for “Frankenberg’s monster” — the NetWare/Linux hybrid called “SuperNOS” which was touted in the mid 1990s. Like most monsters, though, this one really was fabulous, Kearns notes. “Still, I always felt that Frankenberg took the blame for things which were beyond his control (see “Frankenberg was no Frankenstein,”) so I considered it a plus when I found him on Nuance’s board,” he writes.

What Nuance wants you to know about is a new push for voice recognition as a biometric authentication application. More and more e-commerce is happening over the phone (both wired and cellular) where other biometrics (retina scan, fingerprint) are either impractical or impossible which means a fallback to passwords and PINs, things that almost everyone agrees should be eliminated.

Voice biometrics work by creating an individual voiceprint that is unique to the user. The technology captures specific physical characteristics of the human voice, something that other security measures can not do.

So, Kearns asks, why has voice authentication not become mainstream yet? Canada and Australia are further along than the United States in this regard, mostly because of U.S. critics spreading unnecessary fear and doubt about the technology. “They question the ability to handle noisy environments or the ability to authenticate a person’s voice if they have a cold or sore throat when, in fact, voice biometrics are effective in both cases,” Kearns writes.

There are also some critics argue that voice biometrics are not as secure as retina scans and fingerprints, but retina scans and fingerprints do not work over the phone and systems are costly to deploy, since the infrastructure is not already in place. Meanwhile, everyone has a voice and the infrastructure is already in place to collect voice over the phone and even over the computer.

I am a big believer in biometric authentication. Visit Nuance and you might become a fan also,” Kearns concludes.