As we’ve noted before, Sensory, Inc., has long been devoted to supporting TrulyHandsfree(TM) voice control of devices and media, especially in the automotive setting, where wake up words need to be distinguished from road noise or other random sounds in the background. Voice activation has been available on the Samsung Galaxy S2 for roughly a year now. In order to reduce the power consumption required to have the device constantly listening for its wake-up words, Sensory has made sure that the technology for the trigger words are “deeply embedded” in the devices hardware.

According to Mozer, the company “always had speaker verification on our chips.” However, to support the new offer, the company switched to a new HMM (hidden Markov model) based biometric engine in order to provide higher accuracy and lower false acceptance or false rejection rates. Sensory is demonstrating an alpha version of the system running on an Android device and using the passphrase “Hello Blue Genie”. Mozer trained the smartphone by repeating the phrase three times. Then he was able to unlock and activate the phone by saying the phrase, whereupon it said “Greetings Todd Mozer.” When i said the phrase after he had trained it, the phone woke up, but displayed the word “Rejected,” and I was unable to activate any of its features or services.

A beta version of the voice activation with speaker identification technology will be available under license from Sensory in the coming week. As the press release explains, details are available from info@sensoryinc.com

Singapore-based Utiba has spent more than a decade developing a software platform to support mobile financial services. It has established business relationships with scores of mobile carriers, as well as mobile payment platform providers including MasterCard’s association of payment card issuers and mobile commerce software specialist Alternet Systems Inc. All told, Utiba claims that its software is in use in 30 countries and that the “Utiba Mobility” platform has roughly 500 million subscribers giving rise to over 12 billion transactions each year. The platform enables those subscribers to send money, pay bill and receive payments, including wages and government transfer payments, from mobile phones.

Both Utiba and ValidSoft have been actively building a global footprint for secure mobile payments and e-commerce. Utiba is a private company and its revenue figures are not public. It has supported implementations such as G-Cash/Globe in the Philippines, Maxis Malaysia, True in Thailand and the Orascomm Group in Bangladesh. The relationship with Alternet Systems signals an intention to grow in North America.

As we’ve reported here, ValidSoft has been laying the foundation for growth in Western Europe, the Pacific Rim and North America. Clearly the planets are aligning for growth in the coming year.

LexisNexis started the wave when its Risk Solutions business unit introduced to new options to its Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) solutions targeting financial services, health care, government, and retail organizations. As described in this press release, the information giant has long offered a suite of identity proofing and authentication solutions, branded as Flex ID, Instant Authenticate, InstantID®, InstantID Q&A, Instant Verify, and TrueID®.

Kimberly Little, Director of Identity Authentication Solutions at LexisNexis spoke at VBC and provided us with more detail on the intent of the offer. The company has long offered biometric authentication based on fingerprints. It has now added the option for its customers to include voiceprints as an identifier and speaker verification as an authentication method to support phone based commerce for financial services or contact centers.

In addition, LexisNexis is providing the option for its clients to offer their customers a One Time Password, delivered as a text message, email or outbound phonecall when appropriate when businesses or government organizations require stronger authentication to support a transaction.

We were also pleased that two of the sponsors of VBC were able to launch new mobile products from the podium. Agnitio’s Emilio Martinez led off a panel on Mobile Authentication by introducing KIVOX Mobile and elaborating on how development for military, law enforcement and commercial markets has led them to shrink their speaker identification and authentication engine so that it can operate on an Android phone (coming soon on iPhone), even when it is disconnected from the wireless network.

SpeechPro formally announced VoiceKey, a new voice biometric platform that integrates and implements a number of the core technologies, features and functions that it has developed over the years. This includes the “fusion algorithms,” that have demonstrated improved accuracy; proprietary methods for liveness detection, along with gender detection and emotion detection; cross-channel verification based on short phrases; robust noise reduction and speech detection; multimodal capabilities, including support of mobile authentication.

Each of these announcements reflect the fact that voice biometric-based solutions are maturing. That was the major message behind a keynote address delivered by Nuance VP Dan Nordale and showing how the combination of voice authentication, natural language understanding and artificial intelligence was gearing up to support the best customer experience over phones, tablets and laptops.

The focus on mobile customer experience was further demonstrated by ValidSoft in a video demo of VALid and how a shopper could say pass phrase to authorize a payment and make a purchase. When Daniel Thornhill and Benoit Fauve walked through all the steps taking place “transparently” to the user, you realized that the system handled fraud reduction through detection of “SIM swapping,” location awareness and anti-SIM swapping, as well as the voice biometric – all part of its SMART security architecture for mobile payments.

On the other side of the globe, ValidSoft was making news through a partnership with Utiba, a Singapore-based mobile payments specialist whose network supports roughly 40 mobile network operators and banking customers around the world. The companies claim that the partnership will have the potential to serve roughly 500 million subscribers with Utiba platform. ValidSoft CEO Pat Carroll noted that the company handled over 12 billion mobile payments last year.

Partnerships that span transaction processing, identity management, mobile payments are evidence that the value of voice biometrics is appreciated among a broad set of solutions providers. More alliances are bound to follow.

How banks, brokerages, distance learning companies and others build a business case for and deploy voice authentication in the cloud
How practitioners overcome common barriers to adoption within their organizations
Why using voice creates a better customer experience
Practical measures for ensuring the proper level of security and accuracy

Join Voxeo’s John Amein, Voice Biometric Group’s Peter Soufleris and Opus Research’s Dan Miller as they share perspectives on voice biometric-based applications and use cases, and why many companies look to cloud-based service providers to help them add voice authentication to their service offerings.

Live Webcast: Voice Biometrics: Voice-based Authentication in the Cloud

Thursday, March 20, 2012 — 1 p.m. EST / 10 a.m. PST
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The

Live Webcast: Voice Biometrics: Overcoming Barriers to Adoption

Thursday, February 2, 2012 — 10 a.m. EST / 7 a.m. PST
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This Report made available courtesy of Validsoft. Contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net) to receive a copy

Click Here to View the Report Summary

According to coverage in the Australian press Salmat, which handles over 100 million inbound and outbound calls each year on behalf of its clients, had “scoured the world” for a new solution provider. Its vendor selection started with 10 prospective winners but, in the end, was winnowed down to Avaya and one other (unnamed) candidate.

We’ll presume that Genesys, as incumbent platform provider, was considered as a candidate from the start. Indeed, it had shown an impressive array of enhancements to its core Customer Interaction Manager (CIM), including the introduction of a Conversation Manager to support “intelligent” handling of multi-channel and multi-modal interactions. Genesys also has a longer history of hosted implementations of CIM as well as the use of the Genesys Voice Portal (and its precursor VoiceGenie platform) for applications involving voice-based authentication.

The transition to a totally new platform is, to the best of our understanding, something of a rip-and-replace operation during which business continuity could be something of a challenge. This is especially true because Avaya, has had a love/hate relationship with “hosted” or “cloud-based” implementations. The move to IP-based implementations provided some initiatives toward hosted renditions of IP-based ACD and Contact Center resources. According to literature, both Telecom Italia and Sprint have offered hosted renditions of Avaya’s IP-based call processing resources.

However, to the best of our knowledge, Avaya has yet to bless or integrate voice biometric authentication into its IP-based Contact Center or its Experience Portal. By contrast, Salmat has made a point of differentiating itself by offering caller authentication as a service to financial institutions, healthcare providers, telecom service providers and government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. We’re anxious to see how smoothly the re-hosting takes place in the coming year. And we want to welcome Avaya into the community of voice biometrics-based solution providers.

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Here are the important findings as reported by Nuance:

62 percent of respondents have more than 11 usernames and passwords, and that they forget their passwords between one and five times a month. Each time a password is forgotten it’s lost time that could be spent being more productive at work or at home. In addition, 74 percent of those surveyed have been blocked access to important information while using a mobile device because they could not remember their log-in information. The survey also found that 80 percent of respondents use the same password for multiple accounts if it fits the password criteria.

More detailed findings can be found here.

When viewed as a whole, the responses reveal that present solutions to mobile security are both inconvenient and insecure. There are no surprises in that. There should be no surprise in learning that 77 percent of respondents would be comfortable using voice biometrics as an alternative if it meant tighter security, and that a combination of voice and a password or PIN was preferred by 61 percent of those surveyed.

These findings are a significant upgrade from a survey conducted in 2009 by contactcentres.net in Australia and New Zealand. When asked about their preferred methods for identity verification, voice biometrics rated first, but only by 45% of participants, followed by PIN (21%), password (18%) and personal details or history questions (16%).

Nuance’s Twitter poll shows how dis-integrated our mobile identities have become. I fall into the category of individuals with well over 11 user names and password combinations across mobile communications and commerce sites. I was also one of the respondents who was locked out of a site after mis-remembering my password while trying to rebook a connecting flight through a mobile Web site. How I look forward to the day when I can use my voiceprint for more convenient authentication.

The companies are looking for “consumer-facing organisations that typically handle five million or more customer contacts per year, have customer authentication requirements, and currently operate a cross-channel customer service strategy. The incentive to participate will be to gain first-hand experience with voice biometric-based authentication systems and to take part in the development of a multi-channel authentication strategy. Companies are expected to get their applications in to Pierce Buckley at VoxGen before October 28th.