What is voice authentication?

Voice authentication is a biometric technology; one that uses the unique acoustic characteristics of a person’s voice to confirm that “they are who they say there are” – literally!

Each person’s voice is unique. This is caused by a combination of the way a person has learnt to speak and the anatomical characteristics of their vocal tract. Together these aspects contribute to create each individual’s unique voice quality. Voice authentication system use this factor to provide an effective and convenient process for confirming identity.

Voice authentication is a two stage process. The first stage, called enrolment, involves processing a sample of a person voice to extract and encode their unique voice characteristics. The second stage, authentication, involves sampling the speakers voice, processing as in the enrolment phase and comparing the voice characteristics against those in the enrolled sample. The user can then obtain a measure as to how closely the speakers voice compares to the voice of the enrolled sample.

How accurate is it?

Scientific evaluations undertaken for the University of Canberra have demonstrated that commercial voice authentication systems are more accurate than finger, face and palm biometric systems and offer similar levels of performance as iris recognition. Typically, a solution can be set-up to offer security of less than 0.1% false accept rate (i.e., impostors being able to break into a system) even if when the impostor has the correct password information. In a conventional password system, given that an impostor has the correct password then the impostor has a 100% chance of breaking into the system. Voice authentication, therefore offers around 1000 times more security than a conventional password system.

What are the benefits?

Voice authentication not only offers significant security benefits but also offers significant convenience and cost benefits to users. Because voice authentication is based on a voice biometric, highly secure solutions can be set-up that offers higher level of security but without users having to remember complex passwords. This is not only more secure – but from the users perspective far more convenient. Further, from a business perspective resetting password when people forget them or they get stolen is not only problematic from a security standpoint; it is also extremely costly. Voice authentication solves both these problems.