Voxeo Talks

Identity theft is on the rise, but customers still want to be able to access their information freely, and as rapidly as possible. To best meet these demands for security and convenience, financial institutions like banks and brokerages, healthcare and insurance providers and others with a need to authenticate their clients are seriously evaluating their options for identifying clients, and finding voice authentication in the cloud to be an attractive option that can guard against identity fraud threats and create a better, more streamlined customer experience.

In our live webcast Voice Biometrics: Voice-based Authentication in the Cloud, on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 at 1:00p.m. EST (10 a.m. PST), Voxeo’s SVP of Product Management John Amein will join Peter Soufleris, President of Voice Biometrics Group and Dan Miller of Opus Research to discuss voice authentication with cloud-based applications, including the business case for voice authentication, overcoming barriers to adoption, how to ensure both security and accuracy and the advantages a hosted solution can provide in complying with security and privacy concerns.

To join us for this informative biometrics webcast, please sign up below or through BrightTalk’s website:

This guest post is by Ariel Freidenberg, Executive VP of Sales and Business Development for PerSayand is part of our voice biometrics announcement today. Visit the announcement page to see a video interview with Ariel Freidenberg.

---

PerSay is the leading voice biometrics vendor today. We started developing our technology already 14 years ago when we were still part of Verint Systems, one of the leading vendors of lawful interception systems and recording systems for contact centers. Initially, the technology was developed for the intelligence and security arena only. In the year of 2000 we spun off from Verint Systems and established PerSay. The goal and vision was to take the technology and develop products for remote authentication. While they were initially designed for contact centers, they are deployed today across diversified communication channels and authenticate customers and employees using web, mobile, and voice applications. The problem we are trying to solve is how to efficiently enhance security in the interactions with clients while enhancing customer experience.

PerSay is one of the single companies that is exclusively focused on voice biometrics. We don’t do ASR nor TTS or IVR. Our field experience and track record in successfully implementing this technology is unparalleled. We invest significant resources in research of advanced voice biometrics engines, as well in the development of our platform, products, and tools which address all the deployment phases. This results in being the #1 player in this market, with the largest and fastest growing text dependent deployment worldwide at Bell Canada, with the largest text independent deployment at Bank Leumi, and the first ever real time fraudster detection system. Our technological superiority is validated as we constantly excel in the NIST competitive evaluations as well as many other third party comparative accuracy benchmarks. Our products are the most accurate, most secure and most advanced in the market. Our technology is language and accent independent and do not rely on ASR. Amongst the features we developed are:

• Text-dependent engine
• Text-independent engine
• Text-promoted engine
• ASR independent products.
• A patented Liveness detection capability
• Highest security standard of the PerSay platform
• Multi tenancy for hosted environments
• High availability configuration for mass deployments
• Multi-concurrent configurations for hosted environments
• Enrolment consistency checks to reduce FTE (Failure to enroll rate) to Zero!
• Identification of an individual in a group.
• Real time fraudster detection….and many more…

While voice biometrics has been around for a while, there are some challenges that voice biometrics must overcome:

• One of the challenges is the enrollment of clients. The perception is that it is a complex process. As a matter of fact, we have been able to make this process as short and convenient as one can imagine.
• Another challenge is the perception that clients may not opt into the service. In the last few years, identity theft and the need for better ways to secure data and the way we interact with our service providers led to a wide acceptance of voice biometrics by clients, which is translated into a massive number of enrolments on some of our systems.
• One last challenge is the system setup and tuning process and the fact that every customers would like to test the system prior to deployment. In order to overcome this hurdle, we recently introduced PerSay Evaluation Studio. A unique and easy to use evaluation environment that ensure optimized accuracy and fast and successful completion of trials and pilots.

There are a few misconceptions in the market about voice biometrics:

1. That it has to be tied to Speech Recognition and it acts like speech recognition. The fact is that there is a huge difference between the two, and SV can actually be deployed without any ASR capability. Furthermore, SV from PerSay is totally language independent.
2. The second misconception is that the accuracy rates of the technology are the same they were a few years ago where some large service providers piloted some immature technologies then. Reality is that there was a significant and continuous improvement of the technology amongst improvements are much higher accuracy rates, which is translated to extremely good results in recent comparative evaluations and to more and more service providers looking into voice biometrics.

Voice Biometrics is most successful right now in banks and telcos. Both have a relatively frequent contact with their clients. Whilst banks are mostly interested in additional security both in self service applications as well as with their agent-human interactions, Telco’s are mainly interested in reducing the AHT (Average Handling Time) of a call by automating the identification and verification portion of the call.

PerSay has some very large service providers who successfully deployed and rolled out our product to their customer base. A few examples are: Bell Canada, Vodafone Turkey and bank Hapoalim. Nevertheless, we believe that the way Bank Leumi viewed voice biometrics as a strategic asset which ties into their IVR, human-to-human interactions with their clients, and their usage of voice biometrics as a real time fraudster detection capability – really makes them deserve the title of the most advanced and interesting deployment.

Over the next few years, we will probably see a few trends:

• Consolidation in the voice biometrics market given the increasing need for competency to cope with mass deployment challenges
• Development of advanced technologies to cope with various challenges in rolling out large deployments
• Hosted players stepping into the market more aggressively through M&A’s
• Partnerships with risk management and risk assessment companies to provide a more comprehensive risk management solution
• Taking voice biometrics into the personalization market, whether it’s a smart phone, a luxury car, or a smart home…

We recently selected Voxeo as our Partner as we think there is a perfect business fit between the companies. Besides the fact that we target the same customers and can generate leads and opportunities to each other, Voxeo’s mixed strategy of hosted and on-premise offering fit our product strategy. For customers who prefer hosting, our product provides for multi-tenancy and supports multiple concurrent configurations. For customers who would not eventually go for a hosting model due to security issues, we can offer our product to be deployed on-premise and connect it to a local Prophecy platform or Voxeo’s hosted voice services. Moreover, by integrating PerSay FreeSpeech to the Voxeo network we can together to provide a secure gateway to contact centers that uses text-independent technology to transparently authenticate customers as they interact with contact centers’ agents.

We value Voxeo as a leader in the IVR and Voice Services space, and, as the leader in the Voice Biometrics market, we believe this relationship is poised for a great success.

To learn more about PerSay, our website is: www.persay.com and we have offices in NY and Israel. We can be reached via email at info@persay.com as well as sales@persay.com. We can be reached by phone at the following numbers: from the US at: 1-866-239-8515, from the UK at: +800-092-2134 and from Israel at: +972.9.372.8600

This guest post is by Bill Morrow, Chaiman and CEO of CSIdentityand is part of our voice biometrics announcement today. Visit the announcement page to see a video interview with Bill Morrow.

---

With identity theft knocking on company doors world-wide, advancements in identity verification security and account protection have become crucial to large and small businesses alike. Companies who rely on single factor authentication in which passwords and security questions are used as their only measure of security, have become easy targets for hackers, spammers, and identity thieves to drain customers bank accounts, ruin their FICO credit scores, and devastate the business’s precious brand equity. Identity theft protection company CSIdentity has expanded its business-focused identity theft protection Security Suite with the addition of an easy-to-implement voice biometric authentication solution: CSIdentity VoiceVerified®. This innovative new product offers a real-time authentication process as unique as a fingerprint, to businesses and consumers creating a highly secure method to verify identities before discussing or disclosing confidential information.

Voice biometric verification commonly gets confused with voice recognition. They are similar technologies but built for two very different purposes. Voice verification technology is about who is talking, not what they are saying. Voice recognition technology is about what you say, not who said it. One of the biggest challenges for voice or other biometric companies is making the enrollment process natural and convenient to the user. CSIdentity offers a quick and convenient enrollment process that requires the user to repeat simple phrases and takes less than a minute to authenticate.

There are misconceptions that voice biometric authentication is complicated and expensive to deploy or that it is easily defeated. Actually, our voice biometric solution is a simple SaaS solution and one of the most cost effective biometric solutions on the market. CSIdentity’s VoiceVerified® solution also has liveness detection built in to our system which makes it impossible for someone to play a recording of a user and gain access. Voice biometric authentication helps companies deploy a multi-factor authentication solution; “something you know, something you are, and something you possess,” to keep business and customers secure under every transaction.

Voice biometric technology is rapidly moving to production use in every day consumer activities such as telephone banking, call center security, and to enforce student academic integrity. Governments have been using voice biometric technology for years to perform forensic as well as to provide secure physical access. Commercial voice biometric applications are being used to solve fraud and security problems they are currently facing. Experts predict the voice biometric market will grow from niche interests to a full multi-hundred million dollar industry over the next 3 – 5 years. One of our best deployments to date is for a company that has created an online driver education course. They use the VoiceVerified® VAS technology to enforce academic integrity of students enrolled in their on-line driver education courses in several states. We have enrolled over 60K voice prints and completed over 300K verifications since 2008 making it one the largest consumer voice biometric deployments in the U.S.

With the success of Voice Biometrics in the industry, CSIdentity has joined forces with Voxeo to develop a highly efficient IVR platform capable of unlimited voice prints protecting even the largest of companies. We choose Voxeo because they cater to development teams, offer fully certified compliant VoiceXML 2.x browsers, have the most VoiceXML and CCXML ports available in the U.S. and offer the lowest monthly minimum calling plans. The partnership creates a robust security Suite with several unique features:

1. CSIdentity’s VoiceVerified® is unique from other offerings because it provide a patented SaaS model that is remote controllable. Other offerings do not allow a customer to control the score threshold or number of retries on a transaction by transaction basis. Our platform allows companies to be able to tune the service to meet the varying needs of their customer base.
2. We’ve created a Patented Voice Authentication Suite and currently are the only company legally allowed to offer a hosted voice biometric that allows the customer to have remote control access.
3. The VoiceVerified® VAS technology also uses a two engine fusion scoring algorithm to increase our accuracy and reduce our enrollment time. Currently there are no other vendors who offer this in a SaaS model.
4. Finally CSIdentity is the only vendor who can offer both identity verification and authentication services along with voice biometrics. All companies must be sure they are creating a voice print for the correct user before enrolling them. Other vendors assume the company has already authenticated the user through some black box process. We are the only vendor who can offer both solutions in one convenient SaaS model.

Identity theft is now a global issue, with customer accounts, confidential records and transaction logs vulnerable by phone and web access. Personal information is being lost in record numbers, precious brand equity that takes decades to establish can be destroyed in a single moment. Almost every business, institution or government agency that works with employees, vendors or customers over the phone or computer can improve their data security and decrease fraud with CSIdentity VoiceVerified. We offer the ideal solution for securing online data, call center transactions or mobile commerce connections. Businesses cannot trust that the person on the phone or computer is who they say they are in today’s ID theft infested world. Companies of all sizes must take an extra step to verify and authenticate identities, and CSIdentity VoiceVerified offers a consumer-friendly solution to do just that.

CSIdentity is the technology leader in Identity Theft Protection, Voice Biometrics, ID Verification, and Data Breach Management. The Austin, Texas based company offers a comprehensive suite of business and personal security solutions targeting all aspects of identity theft.

For more information please visit our web site www.csidentity.com or call us at 1.877.274.7440.

This guest post is from Paul Heirendt, co-founder, president and CEO of TradeHarbor and is part of our voice biometrics announcement today. Visit the announcement page to watch a video interview with Paul Heirendt.

---

In today’s digital world we increasingly interact remotely, this has lead to increased risk and unprecedented growth in Fraud & Identity Theft, as well as convoluted business processes to attempt to manage the risk. Trust is difficult to establish in remote interactions and is extremely fragile. Without some level of trust – nothing meaningful will occur in a business or personal interaction. TradeHarbor‘s mission since it’s founding in 1999 has been to “Enable Trusted Interactions”. The Voice Signature ServiceSM (VSS) is a decision support tool for the strong authentication of an individual’s identity in a remote interaction to establish the basis for trust. VSS enables authentication and document signatures over the telephone or web using any device or channel.

Voxeo’s leading edge approach to enabling the mash-up of web services and communications technologies makes them a perfect platform partner for the web service approach of TradeHarbor’s Voice Signature Service. Adopting a platform-agnostic and application-agnostic approach to Voice Authentication delivers a better ROI and more flexibility. This approach enables the rapid implementation of Voice Authentication to legacy applications and platforms that support an organization’s interactions with their customers. It also enables the organization to implement a consistent approach to authentication across disparate business units/product lines, communication modes (Internet & telephone), platforms (Touchtone IVR, Speech-enabled IVR, Live Operator, and Websites/pages) and locations (both owned and outside service providers).

Identity and Authentication are 2 very different things:

• Identity is the data that uniquely represents who you are (Social Security Number, Passport Number, Driver’s License Number, membership number, account number, phone number, email address, etc.)
• Authentication is the assurance that you really are who the data represents that you are.

Identity management without strong authentication is dangerous and has very little business value. The risk in depending on the identity assertion is lowered when biometric voice authentication of an individual provides the required confidence to take action. The confidence level required to take action can vary from interaction to interaction based on many factors – the ability to balance these factors dynamically is a key to lowering risk without impacting user convenience.

TradeHarbor’s Voice Signature Service (VSS) provides the core Voice Biometric functions as a Decision Support Web Service:

Decision Support – business rules can be established and adapted over time to consider such risk factors as: the value of the transaction, the fraud­risk profile of the transaction, the history of that customer, etc.

Ease of integration – application developers can deploy Voice Biometrics as a component of their voice or web application using VSS by invoking a simple Web Service API without having to understand the science, statistics, tuning or professional services required in biometric software deployments.

Interoperability – the VSS Web Service API can be invoked on IVR and Voice Platforms using VoiceXML subdialog calls, an xml interface, or on webpages or web-based applications using server-side scripts. The VSS Web Service API enables a consistent approach to strong authentication and business rules across all of the customer touch points.

Balance Convenience and Security – the VSS returns a “Normalized Confidence Score” enabling a real-time risk decision capability. This allows an application to dynamically select the decision threshold on a transaction-by-transaction basis using the VSS score combined with any other factors available to the application.

Anonymous Authentication – The VSS approach to voice authentication does not use or expose any identity information, personal health information or personal financial information.

Legally-binding Signatures – every VSS interaction constitutes a legally binding signature – meets the American Bar Association guidelines for a Legally-binding signature. The VSS provides: Authentication of the individual using the unique biometric characteristics of the user’s voice; Authorization through a provable cooperative act; and an Audit capability to provide proof for repudiation.

Regulatory Compliance – The VSS provides strong authentication to meet regulatory requirements for financial and health transactions.

Voice Signature Service API Interfaces:

The VSS Service is built with the objective of providing easy access for a broad range of applications via simple XML or VXML interfaces, so that multiple applications can readily share the same registry of enrolled voices without the burden of adding and integrating a unique voice authentication system for each application.

The VSS Web Service only accepts service requests from valid Requesters (Requesters with a current VSS SLA) through XML or VoiceXML sub-dialog calls, through secure communications over the Internet using SSL, TLS/SSL, VPN, or other protocols. Communication can also occur over a dedicated connection between the Requester and VSS, such as ATM, Frame-Relay, dedicated T1 or other methods as specified by the Requester and agreed to by TradeHarbor in the VSS SLA.

The VSS API supports both VoiceXML (VXML) and XML interfaces.

• The Voice Signature ServiceSM system (VSS) supports VXML v2.X. A VSS Session is implemented through a VXML sub-dialog call.
• The VSS also supports XML for implementation as a Web Service or with legacy IVR platforms (that may not be VXML compliant).
• The VSS VXML sub-dialog has been tested with, and is currently supporting transactions on the Voxeo platforms and hosted services.

A VoiceXML integration of the VSS is typically accomplished in less than 1 hour using 3 basic subdialog calls: 1. register_identity_claim.vxml subdialog registers a new identity claim (identity_claim) for use in subsequent enrollment and verification sessions. An identity claim must be registered before a Speaker can enroll his/her voice during an enrollment session. (Note: block registration is available for multiple registrations) 2. create_vss_session.vxml subdialog begins a Voice Signature ServiceSM (VSS) session to either enroll or verify the User. The subdialog will validate the identity_claim and return a VSS session ID = session_id. (An example session ID: 4589-2973-9475-4EA5-9B0B-5306-55CF-76CA.) 3. complete_vss_session.vxml subdialog handles the dialog management for passing the prompts for the platform to play for the user, receiving the recorded user responses from the platform, and when the VSS session is complete, returns the Results Variables and dialog control to the VoiceXML application.

The VoiceSig Express (VSE) API is designed to support webpage or web-application implementations by providing the telephony interface. The VSE API supports two basic telephone interactions – an inbound Call and an Outbound Call invoked through server-side scripts = create_inbound_session, or create_outbound_session and get_session_results . TradeHarbor provides sample scripts in PHP, Perl, Java, Ruby, and others.

The primary development effort in designing and deploying applications that use the VSS for voice authentication or remote Voice Signatures is related to the changes required to the UI (User Interface) or VUI (Voice User Interface) to meet the human factors issues associated with introducing Voice Signatures to new users and properly handling VSS confidence scores that are lower than the threshold required by the specific application in the specific interaction or call context.

Summary:

TradeHarbor offers the VSS as a Web Service (Software as a Service), which makes it simple, quick and inexpensive to implement and which enables inter­operability across a business enterprise for all types of Internet, telephone and mobile platforms. While the core VSS interactions remain uniform, the applications supporting various business processes can tailor how the VSS is used: the point in the business process when the VSS is invoked; the “Signature Statement” associated with a document signature or authentication; and balancing the desired security / convenience for an interaction based upon the unique risk and value characteristics of each individual interaction or transaction. The Signature Statement heard in the Voice Signature session can be tailored for each transaction or document type to ensure that the signer is aware of any associated terms and conditions, and is cooperatively agreeing to be subject to them.

Thus, the VSS can enable a uniform approach to authentication and document signatures across all of an enterprises customer touch­points, and on any of its customer-facing platforms. For example, a customer may enroll their Voice Signature when working with a representative on the phone to open an online account, and be subsequently authenticated in the same or other business units. The VSS is designed to flexibly meet specific business requirements, risk management requirements, technical security, transaction enforceability, and legal/regulatory compliance requirements.

Voxeo’s leading edge approach to enabling the mash-up of web services and communications technologies is a perfect platform partner for the web service approach of TradeHarbor’s Voice Signature Service. TradeHarbor’s partnership with Voxeo enables developers of voice and web applications to add voice biometrics to their solutions quickly and easily through the development, testing, proof of concept and deployment phases of their project.

This guest post is by Peter Soufleris, founder and CEO of Vocalectand is part of our voice biometrics announcement today. Visit the announcement page to see a video interview with Peter Soufleris.

---

There are a lot of interesting things happening these days relative to voice biometrics – too many to cover in any one blog entry. So today we’ll start by introducing Vocalect Biometric Solutions, then we’ll detail some of the issues we help address, what differentiates Vocalect from other vendors, what some of our challenges are, where we are seeing success, and finally we’ll look at a couple areas that we believe are particularly promising for our technology in the future.

About Vocalect

Vocalect provides hosted voice authentication services to IVRs, call centers, and mobile applications via standard programming interfaces such as XML and VoiceXML. Our goal is to provide highly flexible and accurate services for our clients that are easy to understand and use, with excellent business and technology support – and at reasonable prices.

Vocalect’s team has over 4 years of direct experience with voice biometrics and hosted authentication solutions in the U.S. We’ve written an awarded patent, have developed several voice biometric engines and signal processing routines, have developed and deployed robust service delivery systems, and have helped clients integrate our solutions into a wide variety of applications.

Vocalect Solves a Couple Specific Problems

Vocalect helps to verify the identity of individuals simply by the sound of their voices. Our solutions are particularly effective when customers are not present for a transaction – such as when they contact our clients by telephone. Our services are able to quickly, accurately, and inexpensively identify customers without any specialized hardware or software.

Increasingly, our services are being deployed as an integral component of multi-factor authentication processes within client systems. Consider a simple IVR example for a credit card issuer:

1. A customer calls an 800 number for service on their credit card. At this point, one “factor” may be that the customer’s caller id information is recognized by the bank’s IVR system.

2. After being greeted by the IVR, the customer may then be asked to enter (or speak) all or part of their credit card number. This knowledge is yet another factor that can be checked and cross-referenced to the customer’s account.

3. Finally, the customer may be asked to repeat a passphrase, speak some numbers, or speak the answer to a question. In this case, our voice biometric engines provide yet another factor. We process the customer’s spoken response and accurately match it to their stored voiceprint – all in a matter of seconds.

This example shows one potential multi-factor approach that gives the bank’s fraud and risk models three factors (or probabilities) to work with. This is a very powerful approach to fighting social engineering and identity theft in IVRs and call centers. And, it can be done without live agent intervention, saving both FTE expense and call handling time.

With today’s tight economic conditions, Vocalect’s service delivery model also addresses the costs associated with testing and evaluating voice authentication technology. Our hosting platform goes beyond providing only voice enrollment and verification services. We also provide a wide array of related services – toll-free numbers and outbound calling; full-featured IVR facilities utilizing VoiceXML-based dialog management; automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities; custom prompt recordings in multiple languages; and custom application and consulting services. Thus, we can help prospective clients to conduct trials and pilots on our system – allowing them to “try before they buy”.

All Voice Biometric Companies Are Not Equal

There are several companies in the U.S. and abroad that provide software and solutions that employ voice biometric technologies. However, it is important to realize that there is a fairly wide range of technical and operational expertise between these companies. Vocalect differentiates itself from other competitors in a number of ways:

• VoiceXML Hosting Experience. Our team has over 4 years of hands-on experience with the design, development, implementation, and management of hosted voice authentication services utilizing VoiceXML. In particular, we have a great deal of experience with Voxeo’s Prophecy platform – perhaps more than any other company.

• Focus. Some of our competitors have focused their development on password reset and other application-specific systems. Some competitors are expert with forensic applications and voice identification systems. And other competitors have client-server solutions with specific hardware and software requirements. Our team is 100% focused on the design and development of secure, standards-based voice authentication services for call centers, IVRs, and mobile applications.

• Industry Knowledge. Our team has significant experience deploying and servicing large-scale systems within financial institutions, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and telecommunications companies – some of the many industries that increasingly need high-volume voice authentication services such as ours. We understand the business, technical, security, compliance, customer, and support issues related to deploying voice authentication solutions.

• Flexibility. We do not force customers to adopt a specific use case. Our multiple engines provide maximum flexibility to system designers. So, our clients can choose to use passphrases, numbers, natural speech, or combinations of techniques.

• Adaptability. We own, develop, and maintain our own core technology. So, we are not subject to the feature sets or road maps of other vendors. Further, our low application overhead and service-oriented architecture is more readily adapted to the specialized needs (and frequently changing business requirements) of larger customers.

Challenges in the Industry

Over time, voice biometric solutions have been proven to be quite accurate and reliable. However, several challenges still remain to widespread adoption of this technology:

• Consumer adoption is perhaps the biggest challenge in the industry. It’s not uncommon to hear prospective clients say “our customers will never want to do this”. However, we have data from pilots, focus groups, and other findings that lead us to the opposite conclusion. People are tired of all the user ids and passwords, PINs, and other things they have to remember. They really want something that is simple – and voice meets this need. The good news is that after several years of successful trials and pilots, we are now poised to see some fairly significant deployments this year and in the years to come. So, this hurdle should become less of an issue over time.
• For any voice biometric company that is hoping to deploy large-scale authentication solutions, another challenge is the issue of “channel mismatch”. As an example, some voice biometric systems don’t work well if you enroll on your landline and then later try to verify from your cell phone. Without proper channel compensation models and procedures in place, clients and their customers could get frustrated. Our engineers focus a lot on this issue, and we’ve been able to come up with some innovative solutions that perform well.
• Another technical challenge relates to quality of service on some of today’s VOIP lines. Good quality VOIP can be indistinguishable from analog lines. However, we’ve all had conversations with people that sound like they are “underwater”. So, we’ll have to continue to work with VOIP technology providers and clients to manage these circumstances.

We’re Seeing Success

Vocalect is starting to see success in a variety of IVR applications where clients use our services as part of their multi-factor authentication programs. This is the result of effective team communications, having the right expectations, and understanding how to use these tools – and in what circumstances. In our opinion, voice biometric authentication is the perfect compliment to any IVR authentication process that needs to be strengthened or enhanced.

One of our most promising capabilities relates to outbound calling – initiated from a web application or to mobile applications at point-of-sale. By placing an outbound call to a known number, the phone itself becomes a token – yet another factor. These techniques are referred to as “out-of-band” (OOB), as you are introducing another contact channel to a customer that is already engaged in an authentication process of some sort. Outbound calling can therefore be an excellent and relatively inexpensive way to provide very high levels of security to applications.

In fact, it was Voxeo’s ability to easily provision inbound or outbound calling to a variety of applications that originally attracted our team to Voxeo and the Prophecy platform nearly 5 years ago. Voxeo provided us with a stable and robust solution that we could simply tap into and have it work. This was a tremendous benefit to us, as we were able to remain focused on voice biometrics.

We’re also continuing to explore a number of new and novel uses for our hosted voice authentication services. Recently we spoke with an Asian company that detailed a use case we had never heard of before. It turns out that our technology is ideally matched to their needs (they are a Voxeo customer as well); however, we never foresaw this particular application because it is unique to their culture. So, we remain very excited about our partnership with Voxeo and the geographic reach their platform provides for us and our mutual customers.

Future Trends

Although it is difficult to predict exactly what will happen over time, the future looks bright for voice biometric technology. A couple of the more interesting developments to look forward to are:

Fast Identification. Assuming that computing power continues to increase, being able to speak and be quickly and accurately recognized (without an initial claim of identity) holds a lot of promise for many authentication scenarios.

Embedded Uses. Within 3-5 years there will be significantly more standardization within the industry, as well as consolidation. It’s quite possible that phone companies and mobile handset manufacturers will embed voice biometrics directly within their products and services and provision and sell them much like caller id or ring tones. We are already starting to have some of these discussions.

Conclusion

There are a lot of considerations relative to voice authentication technology. Should you wish to learn more about our services, please visit Vocalect’s website at http://www.vocalect.com. The Vocalect team will be happy to discuss your needs and help you determine if our technology is right for you.

Why has voice verification historically been so difficult to implement? In an age of identity theft, when companies are looking for additional ways to secure online transactions, why shouldn’t they be able to use voice? In a time when companies are looking for ways to deliver services to customers faster, why shouldn’t they be able to use voice as a way to secure the delivery of those services?

Whether people call it “voice verification”, “voice authentication” or “voice biometrics”, the common question people ask is “Why does using voice for security have to be so hard?”

It doesn’t.

Today we are pleased to announce a new voice biometrics initiative with four of the leading voice biometrics companies where you can add voice biometrics to a new or existing VoiceXML application TODAY. Through the power of the cloud, your application running on our Prophecy Hosting service can securely communicate with the hosted services of CSIdentity, PerSay, TradeHarbor or Vocalect.

If you go to our new biometrics portal page at:

www.voxeo.com/biometrics

you will find links to “How To” documents from each of the four vendors explaining how you can easily integrate their service into a new or existing VoiceXML application. All of the vendors are also making trial accounts available for interested developers. Try one vendor out… try them all out.

The point is that voice biometrics is very real… today… and you can implement security based on voice today on Voxeo’s platform.

Use voice biometrics as a way to securely automate password resets on your corporate LAN… use it as a way to secure an e-commerce transaction… use it as a way to confirm access to confidential information about an order being processed… use it as a way to secure access to your corporate IVR… use it to secure callers into a private conference call… use it for whatever wacky idea your imagination can come up with…

Use it… play with it… the code is out there! If you already have an account on our Evolution developer portal, you can modify an existing VoiceXML application or create a new one. If you don’t have an account, signing up is free and lets you get started right away creating voice applications, complete with inbound phone numbers, Skype numbers and SIP interconnection, as well as outbound dialing, speech recognition, conferencing and much, much, more…

And when you are ready to make your application go live in a production environment, simply contact us and we can get your app running on the industry’s largest VoiceXML hosting cloud and the only one backed by a 100% uptime service level agreement.

Try it out… voice verification is no longer something “too hard” to do… it’s simple and it’s here today!

---

Please visit our voice biometrics announcement page to watch video interviews with each of the four partners, to read guest blog posts and to find other information about using voice biometrics on Voxeo’s platform.

Do you worry about identity theft? Have you had your personal identification information or credit cards stolen and worry that someone could be out taking out extra credit lines in your name? Or committing fraud and ruining your credit status?

Today identity theft is an increasingly large problem and banks and financial institutions, among others, are looking at ways to better secure their interactions with customers. In the security space, we generally talk about authentication as involving one of these factors:

• something you know, such as a password or PIN

• something you have, such as a token or pass card
• something you are, such as a fingerprint, retina, or… voice

Done well, this last category is perhaps the most secure because it is something about you that cannot easily be duplicated. So to that end, we are pleased to announced that Voxeo and TradeHarbor are partnering to bring TradeHarbor’s Voice Signature Service to customers developing applications on Voxeo’s Prophecy premise product or on Voxeo’s Prophecy Hosting cloud. The press release describes the process a bit:

When an enrolled user calls an application protected with the Voice Signature Service, they are prompted to repeat a dynamically-presented phrase. Voice Signatures are used to conveniently authenticate inbound telephone calls or, using outbound calls, web transactions from computers or mobile devices. The Voice Signature Service then returns a patent-pending Normalized Detector Scale® confidence score that can be used as a decision support factor in allowing or denying account access; it also maintains an audit trail, which provides unprecedented accountability. The entire authentication process takes just seconds.

You can visit TradeHarbor’s website, www.tradeharbor.com, to learn more about their offering. If you would like to find out more about how you can use TradeHarbor’s voice authentication services with your application on Voxeo’s platform, please contact our sales team at sales@voxeo.com

---

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook or following us on Twitter.

---

Technorati Tags: voice, voicebiometrics, biometrics, security, authentication, identification, voxeo, tradeharbor

Would you like to learn about the field of “voice biometrics” or “voice verification”? As I mentioned previously, I interviewed the folks from VoiceVerified last week about the field of voice biometrics in general and their solution in particular. That podcast is now available for listening – you can play it directly in your web browser.

As we noted in an earlier post, VoiceVerified and Voxeo have partnered and you now can add VoiceVerified’s voice authentication/voice verification system to your voice application running on our platform. Please email the folks at VoiceVerified if you would like more information about how you can make that happen.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceverified, voip, voip security, voice biometrics, voice verification, voice authentication, security

Today at 11am US Eastern time I’ll be interviewing the folks from VoiceVerified.com on the “Squawk Box” daily podcast about voice biometrics/voice verification in general and about their specific solution. Here’s a bit of a video preview:

Given my VoIP security background, this topic is obviously quite intriguing and fascinating to me and I’m looking forward to learning more about VoiceVerified. As we wrote about previously, VoiceVerified actually uses our (Voxeo) Prophecy IVR Hosting Services as part of their infrastructure so I also have an additional interest in learning more.

If you’d like to join today’s call at 11am US Eastern time and listen in or ask questions, you can do so either through the Facebook Calliflower application or directly through Calliflower.com. The podcast will also be available for listening later on Alec Saunders’ blog at www.saunderslog.com. (I’ll post a link here on this blog as well.)

P.S. “Squawk Box” is a daily podcast on technical topics of the day hosted and produced by Alec Saunders and appearing on his Saunderslog blog. I often participate in the calls and as Alec is on vacation this month, he asked me to fill in as a host for him this week. Other than my frequent involvement as one of the many participants, there is no formal connection at all between Voxeo and the Squawk Box podcast.

Technorati Tags: voiceverified, squawk box, voice biometrics, voice verification, security, voip security