With an assist from China’s search giant, Baidu and Singapore’s Institute for InfoComm Research (I2R), Lenovo launched a new smartphone that uses voice biometrics as a security feature. Dubbed LePhone A586, Lenovo expects it to be a major seller in mainland China where home-grown handsets account for over 60% of the domestic market.

The core voice biometric technology was developed at the Baidu-I2R Research Center (BIRC) in Singapore. It enables smartphone owners or authorized users to unlock their devices by speaking a passphrase. It obviates the need to use a personal identification number (PIN), password, finger swipe pattern or even facial recognition, which has been trialed on a few models of Lenovo portable devices.

An institute affiliated with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), I2R demonstrated how its voice-biometric based technology could identify a speaker with sufficient accuracy based on only 3 seconds of spoken material. Roughly a year ago, it featured its language-independent approach at a technology showcase. Lenovo’s commercialization of the technology marks a breakthrough to commercial distribution in several of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world. LePhone A586 launches in China today (November 30), but the technology has already been demonstrated to work with passphrases that are spoken in Thai, Vietnamese and Portuguese (per this report in NextWeb).

BIRC launched in July of this year to focus on language and speech related research. This bodes very well for the rapid growth of conversational technologies in the near future.

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Tags: Voice biometrics, authentication, mobile speech, speaker identification