According to Wikipedia Voice Biometrics (VB) is identification and authentication of the person who is speaking by the characteristics of their voice. It uses anatomy (caused by the size and shape of the mouth) and behavioural patterns (voice pitch, speaking style).

Australia is at the leading edge of the field. Telstra has been pioneering it since 2002 for Centrelink. Auraya Systems, PerSay, SpeechWorks and Nuance and other Aussie firms continue to define and refine VB technologies around the world. Australia is also where major commercial banks, healthcare agencies, government agencies and hosted service providers became early adopters.

National Australia Bank launched VB for telephone banking in 2009 in an effort to drop all too easy questions like date of birth and mother’s maiden name. Mission successful and more than 3M customers use it. The nice thing about the NAB system is that it is unobtrusive and can determine if a voice has been recorded especially under duress (take that Hollywood producers!).

In Australia Salmat (yes the former junk mail specialists have grown up) have a Natural Language Speech recognition system that uses VB to underpin their call connect system and it is secure enough to be used as the gatekeeper for telephone payment systems.

Nuance (AKA Dragon Dictate) offer Vocal Password and FreeSpeech software as well as FraudMiner to analyse past call behaviour and better identify fraudsters. Nuance clients include intelligence agencies, law enforcement and military as well as companies. Nuance is doing very well in this space by reducing the average 23 seconds of interrogation to verify identity to just 5 seconds of free speech. Nuance is also using the technology for Time and Attendance employee recording and enterprise portal access.

VoiceVault announced that in a study of more than 10M transactions its software had correctly identified 99.98% of callers. Microsoft has independently verified that VoiceVault’s VB solution can scale up to “at least 1B authentications per server per year using MS SQL Server 2012”.

There is even a dedicated 9th Voice Biometrics Conference in San Francisco 8-9 May, 2013 that covers a wide range of topics: replacing passwords and pins; fraud profiles; securing personal assistants (Yes Siri it really is HAL speaking); and customer experience.

Lenovo’s A586 smartphone (China market only) was the first to incorporate VB developed by Baidu-I2R (BIRC) in Singapore. Lenovo had trialled finger print and swipe patterns and facial recognition but VB was superior and they expect to see it move to all computing devices. Interestingly it is also a pretty low cost retrofit – microphones are now part of most computing devices and software is easy to install. Lenovo are also interested in VB’s application to conversational technologies (You seem agitated HAL). Good news is that this technology can scale down to small business.

Rumours (Apple does not comment on them) include iPhone 6 moving to VB instead of the previous rumour of on screen fingerprint recognition.

Imagine having to talk again – pick up the phone to pay… All this talk of VB makes me want to have one...