Opus Research is pleased to announce Voice Biometrics Conference London 2008 -- the industry's only global gathering featuring case studies, in-depth session discussions and independent vendor analysis.
Latest News
TD Waterhouse Launches Voice Biometrics System for Customer Transactions
By Derek Top | August 18, 2008
Canadian discount brokerage firm TD Waterhouse has begun rolling out a customer-facing voice biometric authentication process. The company is a subsidiary of TD Canada Trust, one of Canada's top five largest banks.
The new application, called Voice Print System, allows clients to create a unique voiceprint to speed up transactions and improve the customer experience, says the company. TD Waterhouse has set up several pages on its website explaining the new system's benefits and company privacy policy.
According to an article at ePaynews, Nuance Communications is the technology supplier for the Voice Print System. TD Waterhouse says it is the first discount brokerage in Canada to use voice biometric authentication and is targeting a rollout to the majority of its phone-based clients within a year.
Logica Committed to Access Management and Voice Biometrics
By Derek Top | August 7, 2008
In an up-close and personal interview, Tim Best with Logica talks with SC Magazine UK about enterprise security, identity management, and the high potential of ROI opportunities for companies that invest in access technologies.
Among the highlights, Best's encouraging words about voice biometrics:
Best is also big on biometrics, which he predicts have a great future, with relatively straightforward biometric technologies now being more widely adopted, especially in the banking sector where fear is undermining internet banking. "People are worried about internet fraud and identity theft, so they're using the telephone banking option more often, which means the bank's costs are going up," he says.
And again he sees opportunities against the backdrop of a credit crunch largely created by the banks themselves. "The banks have to fund this growth in telephone banking traffic and pay for someone to sit at the other end of the phone. It's quite expensive for them, so we're talking to a lot of the banks at the moment about using voice biometrics," he says.
Tim Best will be speaking at Voice Biometrics Conference London, November 19-20, on the panel, "Integrating Voice Biometrics with Existing Infrastructure."
Announcing Voice Biometrics Conference London
July 30, 2008
Opus Research is proud to announce Voice Biometrics Conference London, Nov. 19-20, 2008.
Voice Biometrics Conference London is a worldwide gathering of experts, technology providers, and industry peers focused on speaker verification and authentication solutions for contact centres, mobile transactions, forensic applications, and more. VBC London is the only conference to delve into challenging questions regarding development, deployment and user adoption of voice biometrics.
Highlighted topics include:
- Addressing the user experience: Building a better enrollment processes
- Mobile payment paradigms and best practices
- Optimizing authentication performance in multifactor solutions
- Improving customer authentication: Strategies for banks and financial institutions
- Use cases in healthcare/insurance, contact centres, banks and public security
- Support for digital identity management and privacy agendas
- Key perspectives from system integrators and managed service providers
Confirmed speakers include:
- Colin Whittaker, Head of Security, APACS
- Dave Birch, Director, Consult Hyperion & Editor, "Digital Identity Management: Social, Business and Technical Implications"
- David Attwater, Senior Scientist, EIG
- Jim Lound, Product Director, Fraud & Identity Solutions, Experian
- Tim Best, Director, Enterprise Security Solutions, Logica
Click here for more information. For group registrations (4 or more people), please contact Pete Headrick (phone: +1-415-904-7666, pheadrick@opusresearch.net)
Voice Commerce Group Launches Standards-Based Voice Signature Platform
By Derek Top | June 27, 2008
Voice Commerce Group, founded by Nick Ogden, announced the development and rollout of Voice Transact, a payment and transaction processing platform utilizing voice biometric signatures. The system is designed to fit into any financial process where a bank requires a signature.
"We believe that voice-signed transactions and payments will become as commonplace as Chip and Pin because they address key security concerns by delivering convenience, control, and responsibility to the consumer," said Ogden as part of the announcement.
Ogden says the Voice Transact system is the first to establish a framework of existing standards -- including Visa and MasterCard Level 1 PC1, ISO 19029, and EU certification 1999/93 -- and provides interoperability of voice biometric resources. Additionally, Voice Commerce Group will partner with Nuance Communications to supply the voice biometric engine and help in the global rollout.
Voice Transact is the back-end transaction processing system to the consumer-facing brand of VoicePay which was launched in May 2007. Ogden says the end-to-end system will first be offered as a hosted service to banks and financial institutions.
Technology Group Taps Voice Verification to Address Medicaid Fraud
By Derek Top | June 18, 2008
Medicaid fraud is an ever-growing concern for healthcare providers, taxpayers and government agencies alike. The U.S. spends more than $45 billion annually on Medicaid home healthcare but fraud, waste and profiteering has plagued the program in recent years. Increasingly, fraudulent cases are found in home healthcare and "consumer directed" plans where an individual is free to hire whomever they choose to provide home healthcare and bill directly to Medicaid.
Currently, there are over 20,000 home healthcare agencies today serving over 7.6 million people. And with the looming retirement of the Baby Boom generation, these numbers are likely to increase dramatically. Voice biometrics has a role to play in Medicaid fraud by eliminating the opportunity for patients to call in and bill for services never rendered and require verification of authorized healthcare providers.
Medical Management Technology Group, Inc. (MMTG), founded in early 2007, has focused on developing technology to improve the failing systems involved with home-based healthcare. In an interview with Opus Research, Joe Werner, Director of Information Systems with MMTG, discusses the need for fraud prevention and where voice biometrics fits in.
What is MMTG doing in terms of improving home-based healthcare?
The problem typically is that the payment process is slow and paper intensive for the medical providers, costly for both the provider and the insurer, and there is little or no fraud prevention or quality control in place. At MMTG, we apply a range of technology including optical recognition, biometric verification, voice/fax systems, and web-based software to increase efficiency in processing claims and detect and prevent fraud before payments are made. The key to MMTG's success is to keep the user's experience as simple as possible while these underlying technologies achieve their maximum results.
In the fall of 2007, MMTG formulated the concept for a home-based health care system that would verify service by using a phone-based time tracking system and voice biometric technology.
What is your planned application?
Payment processing for home-based health care includes paper intensive systems that result in slow payments to the providers, inaccurate data, and there is little or no fraud prevention in place.
To address these issues, we designed a phone-based time tracking system with integrated voice verification. Once each caretaker is enrolled, they are required to call into our system when they arrive at the patient's home and check in. During the brief call, they are asked to repeat random numbers so their voice can be verified. The caretaker calls our system again when they leave the patient's home and their voice is verified again. The voice verification ensures the paid caretaker is the person who is checking in and out. For each call, the caretaker is required to use the patient's phone so that our system can verify the caller ID and ensure the caretaker is onsite with the patient. The system records a time stamp for each call which can be used to track the duration of each visit. With this in place, billing for these services can be automated and fraud can be decreased if not completely eliminated.
How far along is the deployment?
Development began in December 2007 and in April 2008 the first version of the system was released. MMTG has been presenting the system to government and commercial organizations and is negotiating licensing agreements in upstate New York.
What significant challenges have you run into?
So far there have been three main challenges for us. The first was deciding which voice biometric technology provider to partner with. There are a number of great product offerings out there and we needed to select one. What helped us make the decision was to itemize our requirements:
- The product must be a standalone engine or SDK that we can integrate
- It must be able to verify random speech
- It must work for multiple languages including English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese
- It must perform well with a mobile phone
- The licensing structure must fit into our pricing strategy
Ultimately, we decided that Agnitio's Kivox product was the best fit for us. Kivox works by having the user repeat random series of numbers, and it is language and channel independent. They were also able to work out a licensing structure that fits with our plan for pricing the service.
The second challenge was to learn how to operate the voice biometric engine and integrate it with our software in time for an April 2008 release. Agnitio provided documentation about the engine and assisted our development team with the installation. After careful study of the documentation and experience with the technology, our team became very knowledgeable about handling audio data from the IVR and exchanging the audio and transaction data between our application server and the Kivox engine. Our team successfully integrated the features of the Kivox engine into our time tracking system and met the target for releasing the first version in April 2008.
The third challenge came during our initial testing of our system. The issue was we were getting unexpected results with the voice verification. With the same person calling multiple times in one day, the verification result was sometimes a failure, and sometimes not. The issue turned out to be that we had too few enrolled users in the system to get accurate results. The Kivox product is optimized for large scale operations. To address the issue, Agnitio loaded a sample population of a few hundred male and female users into the database. This solved the problem immediately.
Further advice or suggestions?
For someone that is new to voice biometric technology and interested in applying it to their business, I recommend the following:
1. Research the technology first. Develop an understanding of its capabilities.
2. Once you understand the technology, you are ready to map out what your business process requires from a voice verification product. Make a list of each necessary feature you've identified. For example, you will find in your research that some voice biometric products are "text dependent" which means the user must repeat a fixed phrase like "lucky star" each time they are verified. You will also discover as a pro that users find this to be user friendly and as a con that this approach can be possibly cheated with a tape recorder. With this knowledge, you can analyze your business process to determine whether fixed phrases (text-dependent) or random speech (text-independent) is the most appropriate option.
3. Finally, compare the various voice biometric products against your itemized requirements. This will give you a clear indication of who you should be talking to.
Voice Biometrics Gets Plug on Fox's "The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet"
By Derek Top | June 4, 2008
Voice biometrics as a solution to prevent identity theft was featured in a television interview today on the Fox program, "The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet." James Jackson, self-proclaimed "Father of Identity Theft" and speaker at last month's Voice Biometrics Conference New York, was invited for the segment, "Keep Your Identity," to discuss the various misdeeds that ultimately landed him in jail. When asked if there was anything that would've prevented him from committing these crimes, "Voice biometrics is the only thing that would've defeated me," said Jackson.
The nationally syndicated Fox program, which began airing in January 2007, is found in 68 U.S. markets, including 25 of the top 30. The show includes a typical talk show mix of celebrity interviews, audience interaction and informational segments.
Colorado Prison Department Chooses Diaphonics To Monitor Defendents
By Derek Top | June 4, 2008
A Colorado correctional division has chosen Nova Scotia-based Diaphonics in setting up a telephone verification and information system as an additional tool in helping reintegrate felony offenders back into the community. According to the announcement, the Larimer County (Colorado) Community Corrections will use Diaphonics' SpikeServer platform to provide defendants with pre-trial information, reporting schedules and electronic monitoring.
Voice biometrics is regularly used to track and monitor inmates on parole and those under house arrest.
Voice Biometrics Conference New York - A Resounding Success
Derek Top | May 20, 2008
More than 150 attendees convened in New York City last week to meet and discuss the maturing market for voice biometric technologies. Content and conversations ranged from understanding biometric basics and implementation challenges, a profile of the world's largest customer-facing deployment at Bell Canada, and hearing firsthand from the self-proclaimed "father of identity theft" on his various misdeeds and the need for improving phone-based security.
Opus Research is pleased to announce that the session presentations are now available for viewing or download (in .pdf format) from the Voice Biometrics Conference Web site.
Stay tuned for future announcements about Voice Biometrics Conference London in November 2008.
Australian Survey Shows Little Confidence in PINs and Passwords
By Derek Top | April 10, 2008
Fear of fraud and identity theft is eroding consumers' confidence in the way companies identify people over the phone, says a new survey by Australian-based callcentres.net.
The survey of 216 Australian men and women, conducted on behalf of VeCommerce, found dwindling levels of confidence in traditional contact center security methods such as asking for personal identification numbers (PINs) and passwords.
According to the survey, only 24% of people of those aged 18-30 felt that revealing their PIN number was a secure way to identify a caller, followed by a password (20%) and answering a personal details or history question (13%). Only 6% of those aged 31-45 thought a password was secure, followed by providing a PIN number (15%) and personal details (10%).
The survey also found almost half of respondents (47%) preferred organizations to use a "fairly complex process with fairly high security" for identification. To that end, voice biometrics was a preferred method of identification for both men (45%) and women (39%) and across all age groups.
Canadian Privacy Chief Hails Voice Biometrics
By Derek Top | March 13, 2008
Lending a strong voice of support to the security benefits of voice biometric technology, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada touted an advancement in biometric encryption between PerSay and electronics giant Philips.
According to privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian, the combined technologies, which apply Philips priv-ID biometric encryption to a PerSay voiceprint, exceeded performance expectations and "remained at a world class level with respect to accuracy, plus invaluable privacy and security benefits." The advancement has particular benefits in remote voice authentication where a biometrically encrypted template can be sent without degradation to a processing terminal for authentication.
Cavoukian is unabashed in her support of the development, "We are on the cusp of making a truly positive-sum solution a reality through the use of voice biometrics - an approach that enhances both the privacy and security of a biometric, in this case, your voice, which happens to be a unique and unobtrusive form of identification."
