[Opus Research has released its latest report and forecast of voice biometric technologies and solutions: “Voice Biometrics 2010: A Transformative Year for Voice-Based Authentication.” Below is a brief excerpt that addresses the role of voice biometric technologies in multi-factor authentication, mobile settings, and anonymous authentication for social media networks.]

At Opus Research’s Voice Biometrics Conference 2010, Brent Williams, CTO of multifactor authentication specialist Anakam, observed that voice biometrics solutions providers had, perhaps, done themselves a disservice by concentrating so heavily on financial services. When the worldwide financial chill hit all banks, voice-based authentication projects were the unintentional victims.

By contrast, Williams noted, his company remains very bullish on the potential for voice authentication to play an important role in supporting multifactor authentication requirements for truly large scale deployments, where people have to have great confidence in remote authentication. Anakam has several opportunities in mind in areas where his company has had success: authenticating “extremely large scale user-bases for consumer, patient, and citizen-facing applications in e-health, e-government, e-banking, and e-commerce.”

Connecting the Dots
For core technology providers, success is predicated on working with partners in risk-based authentication, like Anakam (which offers a complete solution of its own), as well as vertical specialists in areas like credit reporting, like Experian, TransUnion, Equifax or Acxiom. This means that success for the technology will depend largely on how well voice biometric specialists can work with, interface to and internetwork across multiple service providers.

For each of them, Voice Biometrics has the potential to be a tremendous differentiator. As noted earlier in this paper, it can serve as the “something you are,” but it can also provide the sort of “liveness testing” that is becoming tremendously important in both fraud prevention and promotion of ecommerce. The failure of solutions providers to reach high visibility and critical mass is largely a problem of marketing, not technology. To its credit, the core biometric engines and application logic is on a par with alternative techniques for keeping imposters at bay and, as we frequently point out, voice biometrics is largely superior of authenticating users (as opposed to their devices) and detecting real-time speaker changes.

“Strong authentication” will be required to give the general public the confidence to carry out everyday activities online or over their wireless devices in a way that protects their privacy and prevents identity theft. In a mobile setting (as well as instances that can be supported by “out-of-band” or outbound, phone-based authentication) voice-based verification should be positioned as the only way that a person (or enterprise) can be assured that the person on the other side of a transaction is alive, well and, indeed, the person he or she claims to be.

Finally, while it may appear counter-intuitive, voice biometrics — which we have argued to be the “most personal of authentication technologies” — will find its greatest value as a supporter of “anonymous authentication.” In well-designed implementations, voiceprints are not associated directly with personal information of any sort. They are merely part of a mechanism that provides confidence that callers or customers are, indeed, who they claim to be. As the follies of Facebook and other social networks raise attention about privacy protection in cyberspace, the availability of this highly portable and personal, yet anonymous, authentication technique will rise in importance.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile services, Voice biometrics, multifactor authentication