In a widely anticipated deployment, Australian social services agency Centrelink has officially launched a biometric speaker verification system used to authenticate customer access to welfare services. The $2 million system has been in development for more than two years, including a pilot program for students and families, and is now available to up to 60,000 Centrelink customers.

Because customers were having trouble remembering passwords for phone access, speaker verification was implemented as “the only thing that might work beyond a PIN,” said Ross Summerfield, Project Manager with Centrelink. Additionally, the voice self-service system frees up Centrelink to handle more complex cases and hopes to improve staff efficiency in handling some 28 million calls per year.

While the opt-in system is initially targeting “customers without complex lodging requirements and who may need to routinely update simple information,” Summerfield says they have no intention of rolling it out to all Centrelink customers. To recruit the initial customers, employees have been actively calling and inviting prospective users.

Summerfield says enrollment takes about five minutes, with a customer repeating an access number three times, their name twice and counting “1 to 9” a minimum of two times. Once authenticated, the user has access to all telephone self-service offerings.

Telecommunications provider Telstra has managed the service delivery, while KAZ provided project management for connecting the system components to Centrelink’s security services. As well, KAZ built dual, text-independent speaker verification engines, with Nuance providing an additional text-dependent engine.

Though the program is only officially available to Centrelink customers this week, Summerfield said measurements during the 2007-2008 pilot showed that 90% of callers would prefer to use speaker verification over a PIN, with 95% finding the system friendly and easy to use and 98% saying they would use it the next time they accessed Centrelink.