After more than 13 crore Aadhaar numbers were leaked through several government websites, UIDAI is in talks to include a new layer of authentication through voice recognition.

Nuance Communications, the company behind Apple’s Siri voice-based assistant, has held early talks with the government to offer voice-based authentication, which the company claims is so far more secure and reliable than fingerprint scan and Iris scans.

“We recently met UIDAI CEO and they requested us to do some tests (for voice-based authentication). It was a preferred technology initially but the commercials didn’t work out. This is a good and reliable technology and therefore has cost to it. Seven years ago, even Nandan Nilekani visited Nuance office to discuss this,” Rajeev Soni, Managing Director, South Asia at Nuance Communications, told BusinessLine .

Voice biometrics identifies each individual through their unique ‘voiceprint’, which eliminates the need to remember and type passwords and PINs. The voice gets analysed and cross checked against more than 100 unique identifiers including behavioural features such as speed, cadence and pronunciation, and physical aspects including the shape of larynx, vocal tract and nasal passages.

In India, Nuance is currently working with three banks including ICICI Bank to offer voice authentication technology to analyse and verify callers. ICICI Bank has already brought 32 lakh customers under the voice recognition service for phone banking and is aiming to conduct 50 lakh transactions via this facility by this fiscal-end.

Nuance, the $2-billion American firm, presently supports 14 Indian languages and expects to add more languages using its machine learning technology, which helps the voice-recognition system learn new languages in a short span of time. The company is already working on 13 more Indian languages, Soni said.

Working with govt projects Nuance has been in India for the last 11 years and is working with the government on multiple projects. Recently, Nuance helped the myGov portal in translating and playing back Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Mann ki Baat speeches into multiple Indian languages. The company has also developed a voice portal for the National Skills Development Corporation wherein semi-skilled workers can call in and speak out their details in an automated system, which automatically creates their CVs.

“India is one of the fastest growing markets for us. In a country where millions of people are still illiterate, voice will play a big role,” Jason Stirling, Senior Vice-President and General Manager, Nuance Asia Pacific, said. “Voice-based authentication doesn’t require any hardware for the consumer. He can use any feature phone to call in and authenticate himself.”

Stirling said the company is betting big on the government, automotive and banking sectors in India.

Erratum

With reference to the story, ‘Aadhaar authority to bring new layer of authentication’ (https://goo.gl/X76sNg BL, May 18), UIDAI has responded: “We completely deny the reported statement made in the story by Mr Rajiv Soni, Managing Director, South Asia at Nuances Communications. UIDAI is neither considering nor in talks with anyone on any such proposal of voice authentication. They had come to UIDAI for a meeting in Jan 2017 to make some propositions on voice authentications but UIDAI had refuted their propositions in that meeting and a communication in this regard was made to them. UIDAI emphatically denies the content of the story and states that it is NOT considering any such voice authentication proposal whatsoever.”

BL’s Varun Aggarwal responds: The story was based on an on-record conversation with the MD of Nuances Communications, whose claim was reported in good faith .

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