The Hindu Business Line : Voice verification to prove one's identity is here

DO you get bored and agitated to repeat the same set of answers, such as date of birth or spouse's name, to your credit card company for validation? A solution is in the offing in the form of speech biometric.

LatticeBridge Infotech Private Ltd, a Chennai-based software firm, has developed Sure Identity, a technology that will establish the identity of a person using a set of features extracted from that person's voice, says its Managing Director, Mr C. Mohan Ram.

A person's features such as liveliness, accent and pitch are captured by the system and stored as original voiceprint. Later, they are compared with the "original", and based on a weighted factor the technology identifies the person.

Voice verification empowers to verify the authenticity of the person, answering the question: "are you who you claim to be." Voice recognition engines identify what the person is saying, he says.

Sure Identity, which uses Scansoft's SpeechSecure Platform, has two major modules — enrolment and authentication.

During enrolment the system asks users to register their identity and "pass phrase" — callers can speak in a language of their choice and can use their favourite song, dialogue or a sentence. The system captures pass phrase and passes the biometric signature to an engine to verify and authenticate genuine users/callers, he says.

The human voice is a biometric measure and like other biometric signs such as fingerprints and iris scans, is unique to each individual. No two people have the exact same voiceprint, just as they cannot have the same fingerprint, says Mr Ram.

The system uses a mathematical pattern encompassed in the voice and can be compared against the voice captured to authenticate the speaker using advanced algorithms to reach a high degree of reliability and accuracy over many communication channels.

This includes telephone, mobile phone and VoIP (voice over Internet protocol), he says.

According to Mr Ram, a number of manual methods are in use to check the validation of the person. These include PIN (personal identification number) codes and passwords using an IVR (interactive voice recognition) system or directly with a live agent, and manual verification through a series of questions asked by an agent, such as mother's maiden name or spouse's maiden name. These manual verifications are prolonged by 30-60 seconds for callers to answer the questions — if they remember all the answers.

The current methods are also open to fraud, increasing the risk of security breaches and theft (someone just needs to know a person's personal details like date of birth and address) and can do many things, he adds.

However, Sure Identity offers increased security and there is no need for bothersome verification information that can be stolen or forgotten. Customers enjoy an improved experience, without annoying questions (tell me last two transactions of your credit card or what is your secret question). Since verification questions can take up to 20 per cent of the time of an average call, voice verification can reduce costs significantly, he adds.

Globally, such speech secure technology is in use in firms such as American Express, Allianz and Air Canada, and in India it is being introduced for the first time, he says.

For Sure Identity customers can own, rent or pay per transaction with minimum commitment charges on monthly basis. LatticeBridge would do end-to-end implementation, including back-end integration. A leading private sector bank has tested Sure Identity and reported satisfaction, but with a few suggested enhancements that are being looked at by the development team, he says.

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