A group of technology executives with representatives from Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, among others, has launched a research initiative to study various biometric technologies and how they could be used to discourage fraudsters’ efforts at identity theft or account take-over. While a number of banks around the world are already trialing or piloting biometric-based authentication for both online and call center-based access, as evident from this report in SearchFinancialSecurity.com, adoption and deployment has been plagued by a lack of understanding.

As part of its long-standing plans for global expansion, Enghouse Systems Limited, parent company for Syntellect, completed its acquisition of Trio AB, an enterprise solutions provider founded in 1992. Trio provides voice processing and call processing platforms for enterprises in Scandinavia. While it was founded in 1992, it had been acquired by Teligent AB in 2006 as a premises-based offering from a value added service provider. Teligent put Trio up for sale in late 2008.

In a brief story in the back of its “Open Dialog” newsletter, Siemens Enterprise Communications’ analyst relations folks mention a “UC in the Cloud” proof of concept showcase at the company’s booth at VoiceCon 2009. Visitors will see how the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform, which has been operated by Amazon.com for about three years now, can support a multiplicity of functions that are touted by the vendors of enterprise “unified communications” (UC) solutions. We would prefer to frame it as a “voice-in-the-cloud” offering because it adds intelligent call routing, message management and presence-based status indicators to multi-site, multi-vendor environments. Relying on Amazon Web Services means that the whole package is highly scalable and can be offered on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.

According to a press release, Voice Application Hosting innovator Voxeo is taking the future back to the past in a very effective way. One of the enhancements to its Tropo.com API-based development platform is support of the venerable COBOL programming language. While some people may refer to it as spaghetti, Voxeo CEO notes that “COBOL still has more installed lines of code than any other software language.” He accurately adds that “[b]anks, utilities, and other large corporations depend on COBOL for their billing and operations” and that these “legacy programs can immediately become speech enabled without any further effort.”

We’ve noticed a few more press releases than normal that mention the granting of voice processing patents. Most recently, Advanced Voice Recognition Systems (AVRS) announced that it has been granted its second significant patent in the area of speech recognition and transcription. The company says that its first patent, U.S. Patent #5,960,447, was granted in September 1999. It carried the title “Word Tagging and Editing System for Speech Recognition.” The second patent, which was disclosed this month, addresses speech recognition and transcription “among users having heterogeneous protocols.”

We are neither lawyers nor patent experts but given that many of the commercial transcription services use a combination of speech processing and live agent intervention, this second patent is potentially very broad. In what could be construed as a threat to step up enforcement. Walter Geldenhuys, AVRS CEO and President, said that he believes the second patent “will enhance licensing and marketing opportunities.”

In a separate, and unrelated development, speech analytics specialist Utopy has been granted U.S. Patent #7,487,094 titled “System and method of call classification with context modeling based on composite words.” In this case, a company spokesperson told us that it is definitely “not an offensive patent.” Instead they see it as formal recognition of the fact that, in contrast to other speech analytics vendors, who take either a phoneme-based approach or resort to speech-to-text conversion before carrying out pattern recognition, Utopy’s methods are, indeed, unique.

It’s really a mouthful, but company co-founder Yochai Konig characterizes Utopy’s approach as “phrase-based contextual speech recognition-cum-understanding.” It provides the foundation for understanding live or recorded utterances in a single pass with both accuracy and completeness of understanding. It is an important component in business intelligence solutions that seek to link contact center and IVR performance with key business objectives. Utopy markets its solutions as premises-based, hosted or on-demand solutions.