Voice biometrics: they can tell who you are and much, much more

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 05:51

IT Industry - Strategy

The identification of somebody from their voice is now a reliable and increasingly widely used means of authentication by call centres, but, according to the CEO of voice technology specialist, Salmat VeCommerce, the same technology is capable of detecting if a person is stressed, suffering from 'cognitive overload' or is telling the truth.

Salmat VeCommerce CEO, Paul Magee said such technologies were still under development, but close to commercialisation. He suggested they could find ready application in call centres. "If you phone up to make an insurance claim, the system could decide whether to process your claim routinely or pass it to an agent for special handling."

VeCommerce has had a voice biometrics installation at Australian Health Management for several years, and one at The New Zealand Ministry of Social Development, but despite saying on a number of occasions in the past year  that an implementation would be announced by a major Australian financial institution, that has yet to happen.

However Magee, addressing a press lunch this week, said: "A major Australian insurance company will go live with voice biometrics in the next few weeks and a major Australian bank will also go live in the next few weeks."

There is a strong likelihood that this will be National Australia Bank. In March VeCommerce announced that it had supplied a voice recognition system for NAB to streamline the routing of incoming customer enquiries as part of its new customer service initiative.

The press release announcing the NAB implementation arrived with the line "As part of the continued development of its customer service strategy NAB launched its new speech recognition and voice biometrics system in October." However it was quickly retracted by VeCommerce's PR agency which said "Have just been informed by NAB that the company has not launched a voice biometrics system."

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