“My voice is my password!”

invisiblebond · 10-08-2008, 01:40 AM

“My voice is my password!”

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Want to call your bank or credit card company from your mobile phone to get some information about your account? Best of luck! We all know that sinking feeling of talking to a computerised Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system: a ‘chakravyuha’ of questions and answers and multiple choices: “Press one for current account, two for savings”; “Please enter your 15-digit PIN”; “What is your mother’s name?; The year of your birth”. It can go on and on till you forget why you called in the first place.
Despair not. Help (and new technology) is at hand which will allow banks and other service institutions to recognise their genuine customers, by just listening to them talking on the phone for less than fisve seconds.
That is enough to establish that the callers are who they say they are. It is called Voice Authentication, and two players — Nuance Communications, U.S.-based leader in this niche, and LatticeBridge Infotech, a Chennai-based company which has specialised in voice technologies — joined hands here on Friday, to showcase their joint solution before an audience of Indian bankers.
The new scenario, which this correspondent tried out, runs like this. When you enrol for the first time, as a new customer, you will be asked to speak out your identification (ID) number as well repeating a sample sentence: say “India is a beautiful country,” three times. The system will capture your voice print... the characteristics that uniquely identify you, as accurately if not better than a thumb print or an iris (eye) scan.
The next time you call the agency, the automatic system will ask you to speak out the same test sentence — once. It may also ask you to tell your ID number, just to be doubly sure. But that’s all. It matches your voice print with the print it has stored — and it can weed out frauds: someone playing a recording of your voice, or a mimicry artist imitating you.
“The beauty of this technology is that it adjusts to ageing — as long as you use the system at least one or two times in a year,” explains Chuck Buffum, Nuance’s vice-president for Authentication Solutions. “If you have a really bad cold, it might be in doubt — and the system will slip into more usual forms of authentication. But in 99 out of 100 cases, your voice is your password.”
The Nuance voice engine has been used by LatticeBridge to build an Indian application called “Sure Identity” (it understands the ‘desi’ ways of speech in English as well as 11 other languages) for a leading national bank which is currently in advanced trials with the product. “This technology and India are made for each other,” says LatticeBridge Managing Director C. Mohan Ram, “After all, 56 per cent of Indians can read, 33 per cent can read and write — but 100 per cent can speak a language!”
“It is not just banks that can be expected to bring voice authentication to India within a year,” adds Sunny Rao, the India head of Nuance. “DTH and digital cable TV companies will soon be deploying it to be sure that when a customer phones to order a pay-per-view movie (maybe an adult entertainer), it is not a child in the house who is calling.”
Many corporates worldwide, use voice to identify their own staff in internal telecoms which may be confidential. Banks are slowly inching towards using it for their mobile-based business. Last week in Bangalore, some of them took the first steps towards gaining confidence that voice is the way to go.