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The Developmental Journey of Voice Biometrics

Posted by: Harm Ellens @ 9/06/2010 12:30:53 PM

In his seminal 1999 book "Crossing the Chasm" author Geoffrey Moore’s observes "The point of greatest peril in the development of a high tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominately pragmatists in orientation.”. Similarly, Gartner, in as early as 2005 listed Biometric User Identification as being in the "Trough of Disillusionment" phase of its Hypecycle technology maturity model; expecting maturity to be reached in more than ten years . Now, in 2010, having successfully implemented eighty percent of the voice biometric solutions in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong since 2004 - to acclaim from industry researchers, clients and their customers - I thought it would be time to take stock of the major trends Salmat sees emerging in the deployment of voice biometric solutions.
 
The first major development in the deployments of voice biometric solutions is the proliferation of deployments outside the English-speaking world. Deployments in China, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey - to name but a few - indicate that the technology is breaking free of the boundaries in the Unites States, Australia and (to a lesser extend) the United Kingdom.
 
Outside the enterprise, in governmental overt operations, voice biometric is losing ground as a single-shot stand-alone solution in favour of a multi-modal method for identifying suspects, offenders and (potentially) victims of organised crime. This multi-modal approach (encompassing voice, facial and fingerprint) is also gaining ground in national government; but very little development of state or local levels.
 
Voice biometric vendors continue to deliver new versions of their voice biometric engines, with most of the improvements delivering small improvements to the scoring methodologies, the adaptation algorithms and integration with speech recognition engines. This seems to lend further credit to the two observations in the opening paragraph of this blog entry. Compared to the speech recognition market where Nuance holds the vast majority of installations globally, the voice biometrics industry is much more competitive - especially outside the Anglo-Saxon markets. None of these releases have resulted in voice print formats changes; however, many organisations remain cautious about future compatibility of their voiceprints, following the change in format when Nuance upgraded its voice biometric engine in 2008.
 
The most fundamental change at present, observed in the majority of the more mature voice biometric markets, is the shift of voice biometric technology as an enabler of point solutions to an integral part of identity management strategies. Salmat has been working on a whole-of-government solution in New Zealand for some time; an identity management solution that emerged out of a point solution for the Studylink agency. The same approach was taken by one of Australia's largest government welfare agencies - Centrelink - when it commenced the rollout of its biometric over-the-phone identification and verification solution.
 
Government did have an early advantage in their whole of government / whole of agency implementation on a number of fronts, the ready availability of a well-remembered, easy accessible identifier (in particular a tax file or social security number) being the major one.  These implementations used voice biometric to identify-and-verify callers. The next generation of voice biometrics solutions focus heavily on extra factor verification and uses home phone numbers, dates of birth, secret question and secret answer as a means to protect access to sensitive, valuable and confidential information.
 
C-level executives that are considering implementing best practise voice biometrics solutions are advised to cast the net wide. In a development parallel to the emergence of the Internet as a means to interact with customers first (web sites), with staff (Intranet) and suppliers (Extranets), voice biometric technology - when implemented with reuse in mind - can service many different user populations across their organisations. In Salmat's experience, a well-considered, planned and executed voice biometric enterprise service bus will deliver a greater and faster return on investment than seeking the relatively rapid deployment of an isolated point solution.

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