Voice biometrics are being used to ID you

LONDON — Businesses and governments around the world are increasingly turning to voice biometrics, which sometimes are described as voiceprints, to replace passwords and fight fraud. A look at this fast-growing technology:

Talk your way past security

Canada’s TD Bank Group, the National Australia Bank Ltd. and the Bank of New Zealand are among the businesses allowing customers to sign into their accounts or skip call centre security questions by supplying a voiceprint.

“There’s no need for a call centre agent to know your name, your mother’s maiden name, your inside leg measurement or whatever,” said Clive Summerfield, whose Sydney-based Auraya Systems is supplying the technology to the Bank of New Zealand. “The machine can verify that this voice belongs to this account and that’s all you need to know.”

Sign contracts with your voice

California-based VoiceVault gives consumers and businesses the option of attaching “vocal signatures” to documents by speaking into the receiver following a telephone prompt. Nik Stanbridge, who spoke to The Associated Press this year when he was still with VoiceVault, said the technology helped cut down on paperwork and increased closure rates for health insurance contracts. Executives can use the technology to close big deals, too.

“The countersigning can be done by somebody on a golf course,” Stanbridge said.

Turn your speech into a spare key

FST Biometrics is using voice biometrics to secure everything from apartment complexes to airports. Voice recognition in conjunction with other biometric techniques now screens those who show up at the door of New York City’s Knickerbocker Village. 

 “The voice biometric replaces what we used to use for a PIN code or a RFID [swipe] card,” FST Biometrics executive Shahar Belkin said. “We found it to be much more user-friendly and at the same time much more secure.”

Help authority keep an ear on you

Georgia-based AnyTrax uses the technology to monitor low-risk offenders on parole. The company’s Louie Hunter said the automated calls to an offender’s home landline telephone prompts the person being monitored to repeat a random set of numbers into the phone.

It can spare people convicted of petty crimes from routine visits to their parole officers.

“It’s better than missing work, explaining to your boss why you have to take half a day, get money for a bus or get a friend to take you,” Hunter said. With voice authentication, “they can step out at a break or lunch and make a phone call and get right on back to their life”.

Quietly being harvested

Over the telephone, in jail and online, a new digital bounty is being harvested: the human voice.

Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords.

“We sometimes call it the invisible biometric,” said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field.

Those companies have helped enter more than 65 million voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to the Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

“There’s a misconception that the technology we have today is only in the domain of the intelligence services, or the domain of ‘Star Trek’,” said Paul Burmester, of London-based ValidSoft, a voice biometric vendor. “The technology is here today, well-proven and commonly available.”

And in high demand.

Dan Miller, an analyst with Opus Research in San Francisco, estimates that the industry’s revenue will roughly double from just under $400 million last year to between $730 million and $900 million next year.

Barclays Plc. recently experimented with voiceprinting as an identification for its wealthiest clients. It was so successful that Barclays is rolling it out to the rest of its 12 million retail banking customers.

“The general feeling is that voice biometrics will be the de facto standard in the next two or three years,” said Iain Hanlon, a Barclays executive.

Vendors say the timbre of a person’s voice is unique in a way similar to the loops and whorls at the tips of someone’s fingers.

Their technology measures the characteristics of a person’s speech as air is expelled from the lungs, across the vocal folds of the larynx, up the pharynx, over the tongue, and out through the lips, nose, and teeth. Typical speaker recognition software compares those characteristics with data held on a server. If two voiceprints are similar enough, the system declares them a match.

The Vanguard Group Inc., a Pennsylvania-based mutual fund manager, is among the technology’s many financial users. Tens of thousands of customers log in to their accounts by speaking the phrase: “At Vanguard, my voice is my password” into the phone.

“We’ve done a lot of testing, and looked at siblings, even twins,” said executive John Buhl, whose voice was a bit hoarse during a telephone interview. “Even people with colds, like I have today, we looked at that.”

The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up.

In the US, law enforcement officials use the technology to monitor inmates and track offenders who have been paroled.

In New Zealand, the Internal Revenue Department celebrated its 1 millionth voiceprint, leading the revenue minister to boast that his country had “the highest level of voice biometric enrolments per capita in the world”.

In South Africa, roughly 7 million voiceprints have been collected by the country’s Social Security Agency, in part to verify that those claiming pensions are still alive.

Activists worry that the popularity of voiceprinting has a downside.

“It’s more mass surveillance,” said Sadhbh McCarthy, an Irish privacy researcher. “The next thing you know, that will be given to border guards, and you’ll need to speak into a microphone when you get back from vacation.”