Earlier versions of Armorvox – featuring only voice biometrics – are already being used for customer identification in the St George call centre, and in New Zealand’s tax office.

Auraya founder and CEO Clive Summerfield (pictured) previously founded voice recognition company Syrinx Systems which enjoyed significant success before foundering during the millennial tech-wreck era. Dr Summerfield said that the latest version of Armorvox which integrated both voice recognition and voice biometrics was now completed, and would be rolled out as soon as a customer had been identified for the product.

The system runs on Windows or Linux servers.

He said typically a single server would be able to handle up to 50,000 verifications per hour, and house 250,000-1 million voice prints.

The Armorvox brand was announced in January; at that stage the tool was purely for text-dependent voice verification. Since then three new versions have been released – Armorvox 7 added text-independent voice verification; Armorvox 8 added text-prompted voice verification (where the system prompts the user to repeat a word which is then matched against their voice print).

Armorvox 9 which was released this month added in auto-tuners, which allow the system to set access thresholds depending on the clarity of the voice print which has been captured.  The tuners, or speaker adaptive technologies also allow Auraya partners to tune Armorvox according to which ever language is being used.

The company has over 40 partners worldwide, and while it will market directly has pledged to only ever sell through partners. Its main rival is Nuance which holds the lion’s share of the international voice market. “Our strategy is to become the alternative to Nuance,” said Dr Summerfield

Auraya has two pricing models – users pay $40,000 a year for Armorvox, or pay $60,000 per server plus 15 per cent a year for service and maintenance. Dr Summerfield said a typical server could support 250,000 people’s voice biometrics print.