In late March, the UK’s Technology Strategy Board – an “arms-length” agency reporting to the United Kingdom’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills – announced a grant of 300,000 British Pounds Sterling (Approximately $480,000 U.S.) for research, development and enhancement of use cases that deploy voice biometrics for strong user authentication. The beneficiaries – VoxGen, MyDex and Latitude Partners – each bring their specific areas of expertise to bear on the program.

VoxGen, as a provider of speech-based solutions for customer care in enterprise contact centers, has relatively long-standing experience with voice biometric-based caller authentication. It launched a voice biometric-based authentication system for banking in 2006. It was one of the first speech-enabled solution providers to bring a combination of speech recognition, voice biometrics and multimodal technologies to the companies in financial sector. VoxGen’s technology providers include both Nuance and Voice Commerce Group.

The partnership with MyDex brings that company’s extensive experience in helping individuals manage or control their personal data. The company provides a suite of products and services that enable individuals to store their personal data and then manage the data in ways that put the individuals in control of how it might be shared with others. In connection with these core capabilities, MyDex has integrated the capability to embed verification mechanisms so that they can travel with the personal data. Thus its services act in concert with efforts to protect each individual’s privacy and to prevent access to personal data by fraudsters. In the context of this engagement, the integration of a voiceprint with other factors (most likely knowledge-based authentication) are designed to provide individuals with confidence that both access to their personal data and protection of their privacy are of primary importance.

Latitude Partners is a consultancy that specializes in demand side assessment of market opportunities. Its role, in the context of this grant, is to provide an understanding of customer needs based on understood use cases. It can then project market size and market demand. Thus the grant is designed to define the role of voice biometrics as part of a multifactor authentication solution while, at the same time, help identify that solution’s market potential over time.

The grant from the UK Strategy Board is, at once, both a vote of confidence in the voice biometrics and its technology providers, and a charter for third-parties to help define the potential market size in identified verticals. It is very timely and, at the same time, a challenge for all concerned parties to continue to identify the vertical markets that hold the greatest potential to build “pull” from end-users. At Opus Research, we believe they will find a strong use case around the need for stronger authentication of the individuals who are, both consciously and passively turning their mobile phones into repositories for extremely personal data – including their contact lists, call histories, locations, payment instructions, photos and all manner of information, activity and images that customarily end up on Facebook.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Caller Authentication, multifactor authentication, investments, Voice biometrics