One of the metrics for maturity of an emerging technology is the formal introduction of packaged products of services. It was gratifying to note that three members of the voice biometrics community made significant additions to their offerings in the past week. Two of them were formally unveiled at Voice Biometrics Conference-NYC.

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.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Voice biometrics, authentication, identity management, SpeechPro, mobile transactions, Agnitio, LexisNexis