Passwords are passe; talking is in

Banks like ICICI are now adopting voice recognition software to authenticate customers

 

You call up your bank. The customer executive asks you for your name and other details. As you speak, a software in the background analyses your voice and authenticates that the caller is the real account holder. It can then let the user carry out tele-banking transactions.

This is something you may encounter soon as more and more banks world over are using biometrics to confirm the identity of customers when they dial the call centre. For one, it saves the hassle of entering the account details and passwords and it also shortens the call duration.

 
“I do see voice recognition in some form being used increasingly as the technologies become more accurate and more robust,” says Richard Stern, professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University. His primary area of teaching and research is automatic speech recognition and related technologies. “They (speaker recognition systems) provide an additional layer of security for the financial institution with no further significant encumbrance on the part of the user.”

Compared to other biometric technologies such as fingerprint and iris scan, speech recognition is extremely easy to deploy and is also cheaper.

In India, ICICI Bank recently introduced this voice and speaker recognition system. Other private banks, such as HDFC Bank, too are evaluating the technology. World over, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) of UAE, Mexico’s Banco Santander Mexico, and Barclay’s are among the banks that have been using it.



Since April this year, ICICI Bank started creating a database of customers’ voice samples. Whenever a customer calls from a registered mobile phone and talks for 60 seconds, the software captures the voice pattern and stores it. In future calls, the customer’s voice is compared to the voiceprint to validate their identity in 10 seconds.

This is second level of authentication. The first is the registered mobile phone. If the customer does not call from the registered number, he will need to resort to the traditional methods, that is, entering account number and PIN. Once the identity is confirmed, the customer can carryout telephone banking transactions such as cash transfers to registered users, bill payments, and recurring deposits.



ICICI Bank has introduced the software in partnership with Nuance Communications, a US-based firm that that powers Apple iPhone’s virtual assistant Siri. The spokesperson of the firm explains its working: “Nuance's voice biometric algorithms assess more than 100 distinct voice characteristics. These are separated intro behavioural and physicals characteristics of the voice. The algorithms leverage statistical models to compare the likelihood of a match between a voice that is being inputted for verification and a voiceprint on file.”



Experts, however, have a word of caution. “The combination of speaker verification with an alphanumeric password is certainly more secure,” says Professor Stern. But the system does not have a 100 per cent success rate. The most respected speech recognition evaluation, run by the US National Institute of Science and Technology, shows that the best system falsely accepted 0.2 per cent of the speakers. And it incorrectly rejected 5 per cent. This brings the best accuracy of such systems to 98 per cent.

To use this software, a person also needs to be in an environment where the background noise is not too high. If a customer uses it while the TV is loud in the background, or in a stadium, or while standing close to people talking in loud voices, the chances of software failing to authenticate the person is high.