Opus Research is pleased to announce Voice Biometrics Conference New York -- the industry's only global gathering featuring case studies, in-depth session discussions and independent vendor analysis.
Archived News Articles
A New World Order for Voice Biometrics
By Dan Miller | October 15, 2007
A year ago, RSA, the security subsidiary of storage giant EMC, gave both prospective buyers and technology providers reason to believe that adoption of voice biometric-based user authentication was entering a new phase. By offering Adaptive Authentication for Phone, the company prepared to pave the way for seamless integration of voice biometrics into its fabric of hardware, software and business policy governing access control.
Finally! Clarity in the form of a packaged offer that includes voice biometrics.
Alas, this simple starting point for business enterprises was not to be. In August, RSA and EMC were conspicuously absent from SpeechTEK in New York City. No promotional campaign ever took shape; no more shoes were dropped. The implication is that a company with a $50 billion market capitalization and $11 billion in top-line revenue could not build a compelling business case for speech-enabling its authentication infrastructure.
The parent company's mantra is to "store, manage and protect" enterprise data. However, like its brethren in IT and network security systems, it has a well-established hierarchy of priorities. At EMC, the order of things include: risk assessment, access control for information and infrastructure, protection of confidentiality and the integrity of information, security management and compliance. User authentication is definitely part of the mix, but it is not a first-order concern, which makes voice-based caller authentication almost tertiary.
Succeeding In Spite of the Cynics
Last May, at the Voice Biometrics Conference in Washington, DC, Opus Research highlighted several large-scale implementations of caller authentication in customer-facing contact centers including a roster of banking customers of ABN-AMRO, communications services customers at Bell Canada and "clients" for government largesse in New Zealand and Australia.
As it stands today - and illustrated in coverage on the VoiceBioCon.Com - we're seeing continuing growth in implementations. In September, BellCanada had already enrolled 275,000 customers into its voice authentication system. Healthcare giant WellPoint has enrolled well over 150,000 affiliated employees. And, likewise, voice biometrics is being used for phone-based authentication of the 128,000 members of Australian Health Management (ahm).
Solving Real-World Problems
The steady increase in enrollments is a good measure of the maturity of the emerging market. It's a triumph for the tenacious group of technology providers that have successfully provided solutions to both security mavens and customer care specialists. They have boldly moved into the market where EMC and its cohort of security "pure plays" are unprepared to tread. Like EMC's product planners, enterprise security officers have a well-defined hierarchy of concerns. First and foremost is to prevent wrong-doers from compromising important data. They fight the most common kinds of attacks: denial of service, constant spam, worms and other forms of malware that can bring down the corporate WAN and make all data inaccessible.
Mobility and Social Networking Will Accelerate Adoption
The growth of e-commerce, online banking and mobile access accentuates the need for multifactor protection of customer data for financial services, healthcare and insurance companies. Thus, securing "the phone channel" was the theme of Voice Biometrics Conference in Washington, DC in May. In the meantime, the advent of unified communications (UC) has redefined the term "phone" and with it, both security officers and infrastructure providers have to take a fresh look at network security.
There is growing evidence that mobility and customer convenience are poised to accelerate adoption. As an example of the first phenomenon, simply look at the roll-out of VoicePay as a simple, voice-authenticated means for mobile phone subscribers to make electronic payments. IBM has made duel advancements in the latter area by making speaker verification a feature pack that is baked into its flagship middleware and application server WebSphere, while at the same time introducing highly-reliable, text-independent speaker authentication, which has the potential to greatly simplify the user enrollment process. (Both companies will be featured at Voice Biometrics Conference London November 28-29, 2007.)
Network infrastructure providers have three primary areas of concern. One is to maximize up time, which puts emphasis on intrusion detection, firewalls, session border control and all that fun stuff. Another first order concern is protecting the privacy of a conversation. This is accomplished through encryption of the actual "talk-path." In addition, the system can maintain "whitelists" or "blacklists" regarding devices that reside at the endpoints of various talk paths.
At this point, the tension between the mainstays of "secure" networking and the values underlying of UC becomes obvious. An emphasis on real-time communications and collaboration dictates implementation of constant "presence indicators," push-to-talk initiation of phone calls and the simplification of spontaneous conferencing. This is antithetical to prevention of unsafe network entrance.
"Who's on First?"
This question, first asked by Abbott and Costello, isn't funny in the context of spontaneous voice teleconferencing or other IP-based real-time communications. How many of us have been on the company's conference bridge when an extraneous tone indicates that an unknown person has joined the call. Blacklisting a rogue device or softphone does not prevent a malicious interloper from joining the call. As the tools for enterprise-wide collaboration and real-time communications take hold, enterprises are bound to attach a premium to detecting who's calling, not just what they are using to initiate the call.
Our hypothesis is that voice biometric-based authentication is the most natural and cost-effective way to authenticate callers in real time. At Voice Biometrics Conference London, we'll have solutions providers and their customers describe how and why our hypothesis is true.
Q&A: Research Developments in Voice Biometrics
By Derek Top | October 8, 2007
Dr. Aladdin Ariyaeeinia, who leads the Audio Processing and Biometrics Group at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., began researching voice biometrics and speaker recognition more than twelve years ago. Most recently, he unveiled a new approach to determine when speakers change in a given conversational audio stream, which will have useful applications in criminal investigations and multimedia indexing. Opus Research discussed current research and the potential commercial applications of voice biometrics with Dr. Ariyaeeinia:
Where does voice biometrics technology compare to other biometrics - e.g. fingerprint, iris scan, etc. - in terms of accuracy, security and reliability?
The accuracy of voice biometrics varies according the operating conditions as well as the mode of operation (e.g. text-dependent or independent, speaker verification or open-set speaker identification). For instance, background noise and variations in the transmission channel (in remote applications) can affect the speaker recognition accuracy. In all cases, the effectiveness of voice biometrics has continuously improved over the last few years.
It is true that different types of biometrics exhibit different levels of accuracy. But this is not the only factor to consider when deciding on the type of biometrics for a given task. In fact, an important factor in practice is the suitability of the type of biometrics for the application considered. For instance, whilst a type of biometrics like iris is more accurate than voice, when it comes to such applications as telephone banking, it is voice biometrics which is the preferred choice mainly because of the convenience, not requiring additional hardware, and cost.
Do you see text-independent speaker verification as a fully mature technical solution for large-scale commercial applications?
Currently, considerable research is conducted into text-independent speaker verification and, as a result, very beneficial progress has been achieved. Regardless, other modes of speaker verification (e.g. text-prompted) are preferred in commercial applications because of their higher accuracy. It should be noted that an additional difficulty with text-independent operation is that of missing data (i.e. some acoustic classes in the test utterance are missing from the utterance used for training the system). Therefore, in commercial applications where the aim is that of secure (logical) access, text-independent is not yet considered a favorable mode of operation.
On the other hand, the text-independent process is more appropriate for certain other applications like operations in smart environments (where, for example, individuals are continuously differentiated based on their voices). This may be in the form of open-set identification involving both identification and verification. Criminal investigations and enhancing the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (through speaker adaptation) are other examples of applications for text-independent speaker recognition.
Rising Security Costs for U.K. Contact Centers
By Derek Top | October 1, 2007
In a report studying the use of speech technology in U.K.-based contact centers, consulting firm ContactBabel has found that the costs associated with agents asking for PINs and passwords has reached GBP906 million ($1.8 billion) per year, up 10% from GBP820 million last year.
The report, "2007 UK Contact Centre Operational Review," is based on information gathered from over 3,600 operations and gives forecasts of the U.K. contact center industry segmented by region, vertical market and other metrics.
According to the report, sponsored by VoiceVault, eliminating the time taken by an agent to verify a caller's identity - which takes between 20 and 30 seconds - can save 20.5 pence per call or GBP2 million annually. Additionally, the reports states that secure automated identity verification can enable a broader range services and fully automated calls would result in agent cost savings of almost GBP2.9 million a year.
Steve Morrell, principal analyst at ContactBabel, emphasizes that U.K. contact centers must balance the need to improve the customer experience while maintaining high levels of security and controlling costs. "Contact centers need to rethink their identity verification strategy and implement a process that delivers a better customer experience, security that is auditable and compliant with regulations, and realize cost savings," said Morrell in a statement.
Last July, ContactBabel released a similar report for the U.S. market and found that 41% of the 43 billion U.S. contact center calls involve a contact center agent asking identity verification questions. According to the report, the U.S. contact center industry will spend $11.7 billion in 2007 in checking callers' identities.
Bell Canada's Voice ID Service Tops 275,000 Customer Enrollments
By Derek Top | September 19, 2007
Last March, Bell Canada rolled out a customer support service offering callers a chance to enroll in a voice-based method for identification and authentication, allowing access to account services without asking for a PIN. The voice identification service -- which was sold internally as a cost savings measure while still maintaining high levels of security and privacy -- now claims more than 275,000 volunteer enrollments.
By calling the customer service number -- which is the same for all Bell Canada wireline, wireless, high-speed Internet, digital TV and VoIP services -- callers are offered an option to enroll a spoken phrase for universal access to the account. Enrollment is completed by repeating a passphrase three times and takes roughly two minutes, according to Bell spokespeople. Subsequent calls avoid the headaches of navigating through multiple layers of IVR menus to get to the right agent or IVR system.
The Bell Canada deployment, which began in September 2006, utilizes PerSay's VocalPassword with integration by IBM Global Business Services. Augmenting existing security processes has been an important part of the voice identification service rollout for Bell. "The primary driver for Bell in implementing a voice verification system was to make privacy protection more convenient for Bell customers," said Charles Giordano, marketing lead for the company's voice authentication project, in a statement.
Irish Bank Launches Internal Voice Bio Application
By Derek Top | September 10, 2007
Allied Irish Banks, one of the four largest banks in Ireland, has announced an internal voice biometric deployment to assist the company's IT help desk in resetting employee passwords. Utilizing technology from VoiceVault, the bank has rolled out an initial implementation to its corporate office locations serving more than 5,700 employees.
Increasingly, password reset has become a popular enterprise point solution for voice biometrics as IT security mandates require frequent changing of passwords, which can be problematic for both employees and IT help desk agents alike. With speaker verification, employees are able to use their voice to verify their identity and automatically reset their passwords.
With VoiceVault's Password Reset Service, Allied Irish Banks hopes to reduce the volume of IT help desk calls as well provide the convenience for employees to change passwords at any time. According to the press release, AIB plans to further deploy the solution to another 15,000 staff across its head office, branch and capital markets staff.
Investor Acquires Majority Stake in VOICE.TRUST
By Derek Top | August 28, 2007
Dutch investor Marcel Boekhoorn has acquired a majority stake in German-based voice verification technology provider, VOICE.TRUST, for a reported 16.5 million Euros (US$22.5 million).
A specialist in server-side speaker verification, VOICE.TRUST has made significant partnerships in Germany, including with IBM Global Services which has previously invested in the company. VOICE.TRUST names IBM as one of the largest customers for its password-reset technology, and last month the companies announced a text-independent system in trial at a major German bank.
Headquartered in Munich, Germany, with offices in California, VOICE.TRUST has sold over one million licenses to international enterprises. The company says a subsidiary in Dubai, UAE will be established in the near future to service the Middle East / Asia Pacific region.
According to the press release, Boekhoorn M&A will support VOICE.TRUST to extend its operations to the consumer market for mobile payment applications.
Announcing Voice Biometrics Conference London
By Dan Miller | August 15, 2007
Global plans ... Global exposure. Those are the two forces accelerating deployment of biometric solutions for both authentication and identification around the world.
As examples of the global plans, U.K.-based Voice Pay has initiated a voice-biometric based system that enables secure card-based payments from any phone. This greatly expands prospects for friction-free use of spoken words to authorize phone-based payments. Other examples include customer-facing deployments in banks (such as ABN AMRO in The Netherlands and Israel's Bank Leumi) and large telephone companies (such as Bell Canada).
Global exposure is a corollary to expanded deployments. Security breaches across all manner of commerce and payments systems have greatly stepped up the average person’s exposure to identity theft. When it comes to commerce carried out over the telephone, the use of voice-based biometric characteristics to identify or authenticate customers only makes sense.
It is with this theme - "Achieving Global Acceptance" - that Opus Research is proud to announce Voice Biometrics Conference London (Nov. 28-29, 2007 - The Grange City Hotel London).
Building on the success of last May's Voice Biometrics Conference Washington, DC, VBC London will showcase real-world implementations of biometric solutions to support financial services, payment systems, customer care, law enforcement and government services. It will bring the major voice biometric technology providers – along with their partners, customers and prospects – to showcase their wares, address common concerns and describe the advantages and opportunities surrounding voice biometric deployments.
Topic sessions include:
- "Biometric Basics" - Definitions, applications, approaches and a look at the state of technology and global markets.
- "Supporting Mobile Payments" - Mobile devices are notoriously non-secure, subject to fraud and easily lost or stolen. Hear how voice biometrics can support high-levels of security to support mobile payments.
- "Applications in Financial Services" (Case Studies - As early implementers, commercial banks and credit card issuers have tackled the most vexing challenges surrounding implementation of speaker verification and caller authentication.
- "Leveraging Security Infrastructure" - The most successful and cost-effective implementations of voice biometrics most often extend existing infrastructure for information security and access control.
- "Applications in Law Enforcement" - Voice biometrics is playing a higher-profile role in tracking down and identifying criminals around the world.
- "Focus on the User Experience" - This session is designed to put a focus on the most important people in the voice biometric equation: callers.
Confirmed speakers include Nick Ogden, CEO of Voice Pay, and Mark Pewlewski, Technical Group Leader at British Telecom, as well as solutions implementers and thought leaders from IBM and ABN AMRO. Check the conference Web site for news regarding new speakers and presentations.
The global roster of sponsors includes VoiceVault, Agnitio, Nuance and PerSay.
In order to qualify for the special early-bird rate (GBP 499) for the Voice Biometrics Conference London show, please register now!
For more information: www.voicebiocon.com
Voice Biometrics Nabs Brazilian Suspect
By Derek Top | August 10, 2007
In a widely circulated Reuters story, suspected Brazilian drug cartel mastermind, Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia, was arrested today after positive voice recognition confirmed his identification.
Ramirez Abadia was indicted in the United States in 2004 on racketeering charges as an alleged key member in a cartel that sent 550 tons of cocaine to the U.S. from 1990 to 2003, according to the story. The suspect had gone through "radical" plastic surgery to alter his appearance and avoid arrest. According to the Reuters story:
"Brazilian police had difficulty making a positive identification of Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia while they investigated a money-laundering scheme he allegedly orchestrated in hiding in Brazil, but got a break after taping him on the telephone and passing that information to agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, said the lawyer, Sergio Alambert.
"The recording was compared in the United States to other tapes of Ramirez Abadia's voice, leading to a match that allowed Brazilian police to identify him so he could be arrested."
While no specific voice biometric vendor was named, it's clear government authorities relied on speaker identification technologies to identify the suspect and have confidence in the match.
IBM Announces Speaker Verification Feature Pack
By Derek Top | July 31, 2007
After years of testing and tweaking "conversational biometrics" in the lab, IBM announced this week a new speaker verification feature pack for its WebSphere middleware. The announcement opens the door for go-to-market IBM partners to produce fully mature voice biometric security solutions.
"This is middleware and we want our partners to build applications around it," says Brian Garr, Director of Enterprise Speech with IBM. "There is a policy manager available but we want partners [to help] build the policy."
The speaker identity verification feature on the WebSphere Voice Server product captures the utterances of callers, compares to stored voice prints and then calculates a score. With the policy manager, the score can be used to determine the quality of the match and then inform an application to proceed or not.
IBM's new feature pack is also language, grammar and text independent, meaning a caller can be verified with a simple statement such as "I want to check my balance." According to Garr, this feature accelerates the call flow process, speeding customers through IVR systems and increasing call completion rates - not to mention, saving customers the hassle of having to repeat account information.
IBM has named VOICE.TRUST as a partner, who has included the speaker verification feature pack in a customer-facing pilot currently underway at a large German bank.
Voice Biometrics Market Potential Study
By Dan Miller | July 23, 2007
The market for voice biometrics-based authentication software is starting to mature. The technology has proven its efficacy and value as the basis of password reset applications for enterprise Help Desk, leading to tens of millions of dollars in recurring revenue. Yet, according to this Opus Research report, the market will reach a positive inflection point as "customer-facing" deployments grow to support secure, phone-based access to financial services, e-government and electronic payments.
Click here to see the Opus Research report summary
Voice Biometrics Community Update
By Derek Top | July 16, 2007
As evidenced in the news items listed below, "buy-side" interest in voice biometrics and speaker verification is on the rise. Collectively, these announcements point to increasing momentum for the voice biometrics sector as requests for information on speaker verification projects have accelerated measurably in recent weeks. The next sign of a maturing market will be achieved when these partnerships and pilot installations evolve into larger, revenue-generating, customer-facing deployments.
Diaphonics and BioPassword Team Up
Last week, Canadian-based voice biometrics technology provider Diaphonics announced a partnership with BioPassword, makers of keystroke biometric authentication software. The partnership, formed out of board discussions, is a clear attempt by both companies to target Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) recommendations for multi-factor authentication in electronic banking environments.
While BioPassword's solutions are designed to match keystroke patterns with an online user name and password, the company saw a need to complement its existing software with a voice biometric-based resource. Diaphonics, which has targeted corrections departments and the financial services industry, provides a premises-based, caller voice-verification solution.
The value proposition for both companies is to create a common data store and interface for clients. The architecture doesn't require special hardware or software and, as Jeremy Bernard, VP of Marketing with Diaphonics, put it in an interview with Opus Research, the platform is "low cost, easy to deploy and easy to manage."
In order to ramp up for prospective banking clients, Diaphonics and BioPassword (which received $11 million in a third round of funding in February from RRE Ventures) have been sharing account information and making joint sales calls. While no customers have been named, Diaphonics says the combined solution is currently being architected with a template ready in the next 6-8 weeks.
PerSay Eyes Latin American Market
Announced last week at a banking conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Israel-based PerSay and Wittel, a provider of contact center technology solutions for Brazil's banking and telcos, will target the recent rise in financial services fraud attempts in Latin America.
The partnership was forged after the company executives held meetings at G-Force, Genesys Labs' user conference. Wittel is one of the main distributors of Genesys platforms for Brazilian contact centers. Persay's FreeSpeech voice authentication tool has been integrated into the Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) and designed for call centers to verify the identity of a caller.
According to Ariel Freidenberg, VP of global sales and development with PerSay, the partnership will expedite PerSay's attempts to enter the Latin American market. Goals of the partnership include enhancing security for call center banking customers and improving the customer experience, says Freidenberg.
CellMax Systems In Panama
Latin America has also been the focus of another Israeli-based voice biometrics vendor, CellMax Systems. In May, CellMax signed a five-year distribution agreement with Multitek, Corp. S.A. of Panama City. Multitek is a Panama-based provider of communications solutions and operates the largest retail computer store in Panama. Multitek names Cisco, Polaroid, HP Hyundai and Sharp among its partners.
The terms of the agreement allow for Multitek to serve as the local integrator and regional distributor of CellMax Systems technology into call centers exclusively into Panama, as well as a push into neighboring Costa Rica and Colombia. According to the press release issued by both companies, the Latin American contact center space, serving both the Spanish and English language commercial and financial markets, is the fastest growing in the world.
