Articles

IBM Labs Boosting “The Spoken Web”

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This article in the Economist magazine, entitled, “A Web of Sound: Talk About That”, reminded me that the legend of using VoiceXML to speech-enable the World Wide Web is alive, well and targeting the greater good by making Web sites more accessible to the illiterate. The article’s author credits Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, with undertaking a project to make it easier to develop so called “voice sites” which enable callers to navigate the Web and retrieve personal information.

The Message of Voice Biometrics: “Your Identity is Important to Us”

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One of the banes of phone-based commerce is the phrase, “Your call is important to us.” It tends to be the last thing an inbound customer hears from an IVR system before being put on interminable hold. It would be much more reassuring – and accurate – for an IVR to say that “Your identity is very important to us” and then, rather than indiscriminately placing each call on hold, to treat each caller according to his or her expressed preferences, status, or other known attributes.

Frogtek offers Smartphone-based Accounting for “Mom & Pops” in Emerging Markets

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Thanks to a Tweet from my Alma Mater pointing to this blog post, I’ve learned about an initiative to use smartphones as a transformative tool for small businesses in so-called emerging markets. The article provides some background into the growth of mobile applications for shopping and e-commerce; primarily through the use of text messaging protocols. However, the post’s authors – the co-founders of Frogtek – are more interested in the proliferation of smartphones as platforms for business management applications.

National Australia Bank Launches Customer-Facing Voice Biometric Service

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Australia continues to be a hotbed for the latest in voice biometrics announcements. In another widely rumored deployment, National Australia Bank (NAB) has officially launched a voice verification service, making it available to the company’s 3.3 million personal banking customers.

Aimed at “delivering enhanced customer experience and security,” the public deployment comes after NAB ran a successful internal pilot involving 2,000 branch staff in May. The voice biometrics-based service is part of a multi-million dollar effort to upgrade a range of new security functions available to NAB personal banking customers.

According to a company statement, “With identity theft related fraud increasingly moving to the phone channel, the use of voice biometrics enables the effective identification, authentication and verification of customers, offering an extra layer of protection,” said Warren Shaw, executive general manager with NAB Personal Banking.

Successful authentication pilot programs have longed been rumored for financial services organizations, but NAB’s official launch marks the first bank – both in Australia and globally – to go public with a large-scale, customer-facing service. More to come…

Aviva Launches Voice Biometric Capability

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Speaking at last month’s Voice Leadership Forum in Sydney, Australia, Paul Magee, managing director with Salmat VeCommerce, predicted “an insurance company and bank are going live with its biometrics technology in the next few weeks.”

True to MaGee’s word, Australian life insurance and wealth management provider Aviva today announced the deployment of a voice biometric service to expedite the process of routing customers to appropriate resources over the phone. Utilizing Salmat VeCommerce’s VeSecure service, callers to Aviva can be quickly verified in order to access all insurance, investment and superannuation products. Enrollment to the service takes approximately two minutes, but Aviva guarantees “subsequent calls will be a faster and better experience.”

In a statement, Frank Lombardo, Group Director Operations at Aviva said, “Voice biometrics is yet another way in which Aviva is improving [customer] experience for both our customers and financial planners.”

Aviva has set up a website page to address frequently asked questions about the voice verification system and includes a prominent mention on the company’s home page.

Aviva Australia, combined with funds management arm Aviva Investors, manages or administers more than AUD$19.2 billion in funds for more than 350,000 customers. Both are part of the global Aviva group, the world’s fifth largest insurance group.

Genesys’ UC-Connect Debuts Today

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Genesys has formally launched UC-Connect, a software suite that tightly links Genesys branded Customer Interaction Management (CIM) resources with IBM SameTime, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Siemens OpenScape and parent company Alcatel-Lucent’s MyInstant Communicator.