I had a note last week from PR dynamo Melissa Hyland talking about new voice biometrics solutions from Nuance Communications. Since I hadn’t covered the company before, I looked up their management and advisers to see if there were any “old friends” – and I found one.
Sitting on Nuance’s Board of Directors is Robert J. Frankenberg, the man best known (here, at least) for “Frankenberg’s monster” – the NetWare/Linux hybrid called “SuperNOS” which was touted in the mid ’90s. Like most monsters, though, this one really was fabulous. Still, I always felt that Frankenberg took the blame for things which were beyond his control (see “Frankenberg was no Frankenstein,”) so I considered it a plus when I found him on Nuance’s board.
What Nuance wants you to know about is a new push for voice recognition as a biometric authentication application. More and more e-commerce is happening over the phone (both wired and cellular) where other biometrics (retina scan, fingerprint) are either impractical or impossible which means a fallback to passwords and PINs, things that almost everyone agrees should be eliminated.
Voice biometrics work by creating an individual voiceprint that is unique to the user. The technology captures specific physical characteristics of the human voice, something that other security measures can’t do.
So, why hasn’t voice authentication become mainstream yet? Canada and Australia are further along than the U.S. in this regard, mostly because of U.S. critics spreading unnecessary fear and doubt about the technology. They question the ability to handle noisy environments or the ability to authenticate a person’s voice if they have a cold or sore throat when, in fact, voice biometrics are effective in both cases.
There are also some critics argue that voice biometrics are not as secure as retina scans and fingerprints, but retina scans and fingerprints don’t work over the phone and systems are costly to deploy, since the infrastructure is not already in place. Meanwhile, everyone has a voice and the infrastructure is already in place to collect voice over the phone and even over the computer.
I am a big believer in biometric authentication. Visit Nuance and you might become a fan also.
Upcoming event: The fall Internet Identity Workshop has just been announced. Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2009 – Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Registration is now open.
