Voice biometrics: coming to a bank near you

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 08 March 2008 06:02

Your IT - Home IT

According to Lewis, "the technology has been mature for four or five years, but it is just starting to see a lot of use...[However] there have been a number of early adopters, including Australian Health Management, a small health management company in Wollongong with about a 60 seat all centre. We put a system in there about two years ago.

"The first reason they started talking to us was to increase efficiency: to streamline the none value add part of the interaction: what's your policy number - what's your date of birth, what do you want to do? - that are needed before the operator can get to the value add part of the conversation." Now, you say you membership number and the system goes away and checks that against the stored profile. They are saving about 30 seconds on every phone call."

Lewis added that pay TV operator, Austar, was also using voice biometric technology for customers ordering movies on demand. "People don't want their kids calling up and ordering all sorts of movies." St George Bank also uses it to identify callers to its internal help desk.

VeCommerce offers an online demonstration of how its technology, operates. Visitors can register their own voice profile and then use it to authenticate the 'transfer' of funds to a mock banking site.