Auraya’s AmorVox Marks New Packaging and Pricing for Voice Biometrics
News from Nashua, New Hampshire, the U.S. headquarters of Auraya, announces the launch of AmorVox(TM), a highly flexible packaging of the company’s voice biometric technologies. Described as a “Speaker Identity System,” AmorVox is designed to make it simple for IVR application developers, contact center infrastructure providers and other go-to-market partners to include speaker identification and verification in their service offerings.
The company already points to showcase deployments at St. Georges Bank and its parent company Westpac, National Australia Bank and New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Service, which have been implemented in conjunction with Australia’s Salmat. Other partners include hosted services specialist Voxeo and NSC Group, a leading reseller and integrator of Avaya’s contact center infrastructure in Australia.
Auraya is leveraging its existing technology, relationships and experience into its new commercial offering. One of the most interesting aspects of AmorVox is an entry-level ($20,000 US) “Lighthouse” subscription that gives its customers (meaning qualified voice system integrators and enterprise-based developers) a year’s license of the core technology, “unlimited” enrollments and storage of voiceprints and Web-based Web-based access to training and technical support related to installation, configuration and tuning. Early adopters can also expect to get extra handholding.
The standard pricing for Auraya’s technology is also quite simple. It starts at $60,000 US for a perpetual license (renewable annually) for single server deployment, which also includes unlimited enrollments and storage of enrolled voiceprints. The server can be deployed on premises or “in the cloud” to support a Software as a Service (SaaS) offer by a partner. Larger scale integrations will require multiple server licenses.
Other key differentiators for ArmorVox include support of both text-dependent and text-independent deployments, a feature that gives it international appeal; tuning services which take advantage of its proprietary technology, ImposterMap(TM), to help partners set different thresholds for each voiceprint based on attributes that have an impact on the confidence that can be associated the individual enrollee.
According to Clive Summerfield, CEO and Founder of Auraya, the company provides “all the bells and whistles for the partners to apply their own rules and establish their own thresholds.” But they benefit from Auraya’s six year history in the field.
Dutch Private Funding Organization Backs VoiceTrust’s Proof-of-Life Offering in Pakistan
In this press release issued out of the United Arab Emirates, Tariq Habib, CEO of voice biometric technology provider VoiceTrust, acknowledged that the Dutch government is investing in his company’s initiative to use voice biometrics to support user authentication to prevent fraud in the transfer of payments among people in Pakistan. The initiative will rely on VoiceTrust’s trade marked “Proof-of-Life” solutions.
According to Martijn Moonen, Project Officer, for Holland’s Private Sector Investment Programme (PSI), VoiceTrust’s project garnered a subsidy from the Dutch Government “because the service[s] to be provided are an important step towards delivering banking and financial services to the unbanked population [and]… reduced transaction costs allow new small businesses to make use of the extensive mobile network in Pakistan.”
Moonen added, “This kind of private sector investment is exactly what PSI is meant for.”
I’m not sure this applies specifically to VoiceTrust, but Moonen was quoted in an earlier dispatch as saying that “under the PSI program, the Dutch government provides 60 percent subsidy to the joint venture projects of foreign investment in Pakistan involving technology transfer from developed countries to Pakistan.” Such support would be a big boost for the cause of voice-based authentication throughout the region.
Habib has ambitious plans for enrolling millions of Pakastanis in the Proof-of-Life program not only to support mobile payments but also to prevent fraudulent ID claims from recipient of government social welfare payments. He will be a featured speaker at Voice Biometrics Conference NYC to be held April 3-4, 2012, where he will provide practical advice based on real world experience delivering voice-based authentication and proof of life to support mobile payments and money transfers in Pakistan and elsewhere.
The Opus Research report on Voice Biometric Best Practices is raising the profile of multifactor authentication for secure customer care, proof-of-life and password management. Join Pat Carroll, CEO of Validsoft, and Opus Research’s Dan Miller as they provide more details about increased interest from mobile subscribers, financial institutions and government agencies and share what they expect to see in the coming years.
Live Webcast: Voice Biometrics: Overcoming Barriers to Adoption
Thursday, February 2, 2012 — 10 a.m. EST / 7 a.m. PST
Sign Up Below!
Or click here to learn more and to register to participate.
Research Report – Voice Biometric Authentication Best Practices: Overcoming Obstacles to Adoption
Featured Research
As technology providers and system integrators around the world successfully bring their solutions to market, we’re identifying the product attributes, architectures and deployment strategies that define the best practices in layered, multi-factor and risk-based deployments of voice biometrics.
This Report made available courtesy of Validsoft. Contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net) to receive a copy
For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).
We’ve received news from Indriya Innovations in Singapore that PT Bank Negara Indonesia (Persero) Tbk (BNI) in Jakarta, Indonesia has completed a pilot and moved to full implementation of a multifactor authentication system that employs voice biometrics for automated password reset.
The move marks a “first” in the Asian financial industry and marks a major step forward for voice biometrics, given that BNI is so well respected and is one of the largest banks in Indonesia. Its deployment validates our observation (reinforced by the the likes of IBM Research), that deployments of voice biometrics globally are accelerating.
BNI, which was founded in 1946, underwent a major rebranding and repositioning in 2004. It now employees 20,000 people and has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and London, as well as an agency in New York. In the press release, company spokesperson M. Harsono, (IT Helpdesk & Command Center Group Head) explained that “resetting passwords have often posed challenges for our IT help desk.” He noted that company policy allows only “strong passwords” which consist of “a combination of alphabets, numbers and special characters.” The result is that “BNI users have often forgotten their passwords.”
Thousands of employees from around the country were calling the Help Desk to reset their passwords. This labor-intensive process has been alleviated by the new, Web-based, multifactor password reset application from Indriya Innovations. Requests from the Web portal give rise to an outbound call to one of the phones or IP-based devices that have been registered with the Help Desk. The multifactor solution integrates “something you have” (the phone device), with “something you know” (challenge questions and a series of numbers) and integrates the Nuance Vocal Password biometric engine.
The pilot and initial implementation supports Indonesia’s national language, Bahasa, for the convenience of domestic employees, thus affirming that voice-based authentication can support multiple languages. If adoption runs true to form (as described by IBM and others) password reset apps are the introduction of multifactor authentication that ultimately replaces passwords in a number of use cases, in banking, healthcare, government transfer payments and mobile commerce.
(Updated: Wednesday Jan 4, 2012 8:40 AM Pacific)
Here’s a good way to spend the next five minutes. Click on this link to see a YouTube feature that IBM calls “5 in 5.” In it, an unnamed IBM researcher walks through five major scientific developments that are destined to bring well-understood benefits to the mass market. The ideas are pretty broad. First is the concept of people power as the ultimate renewable resource. For example showing how a person peddling a bike would be using the energy to charge a battery (I’m thinking back to my first Schwinn, which had a small generator to power its front headlight and red backlight).
Under the topic of “mind reading” IBM demonstrated the ability to move “beyond gaming” to ways to “link your brain to devices” so that simply thinking about a device or appliance can take control of it. More realistic is the use of mobile devices to bridge the digital divide by putting affordable, communicating computers (aka smartphones) in everyone’s hands. Then there is the slightly less likely ability to use analytics to eliminate “spam” email.
But the most interesting, from our voice biometrics-driven point of view, is the idea of using a biometric (the researcher specifically cites voiceprints or iris scans) to take the place of passwords for all those times a password-driven barrier acts as a deterrent to getting email, playing music, making a purchase or even getting on an employer’s VPN (virtual private network). Purveyors of voice biometrics-based solutions are familiar with the problems that complex business rules surrounding passwords can generate. People who have to change their password every three months and replace those that rely on mnemonics with ones that “contain at least 8 characters which must include at least one number and one symbol” are going to either forget them or write them down on highly “discoverable” Post-It notes.
Their answer, thus far, has been “Password Reset” (PWR) solutions. Recognizing that there is a built in business case for a system, service or platform that can automate the processes underlying PWR by using a voice print (rather than challenge questions from highly-trained tech support or help desk personnel), a number of firms address the PWR market. But in this video, IBM’s researchers indicate that providers of PWR are thinking too small. Instead of merely resetting the password, they think we should be replacing it.
I agree with IBM on two counts. First, biometrics are destined to make passwords irrelevant in the next five years. Second, the transition will be based on presenting wireless subscribers with a very simple alternative to cumbersome passwords as mechanisms for carrying out e-commerce. Voice will co-exist with other biometrics (fingerprint, facial recognition, iris scans, primarily) but the idea of “never having to remember another password” will win the day with everyday people.
Just add IBM to the list of technology’s household names, also including Gartner, who see voice biometrics making an entry to the mainstream in less than five years. It’s time to think beyond mere password reset to multi-factor password replacement.
In October of this year, Australian-based Auraya Systems announced the opening of a North American office in Nashua, NH. Today (December 1) the company formally announced the launch of its flagship product line ArmorVox. The new suite of software and services is built around Auraya’s core biometric engine (Release 6.2.2), which supports text-dependent voice biometric authentication over a Web services API.
In the video below, Auraya founder, Clive Summerfield, describes three product attributes that differentiate the current versions of ArmorVox from its competitors.
Auraya Systems Innovations from ArmorVox on Vimeo.
One is “Imposter Maps” which is a mechanism for “bombarding” the system with a variety of utterances from imposters, to help harden the system based on a background database. Second is “Speaker Adaptive Thresholds,” which lets deployers tune the system to treat each, individual voiceprint based on attributes that determine its susceptibility to imposters. Finally, Voice QA refers to techniques to combat the creation of faulty voiceprints during enrollments (for instance, by detecting a noisy environment or noisy line). The same QA techniques are applied during the authentication process in order to prevent faulty sample matching that might lead to false acceptance or false rejection of a submitted utterance.
The product roadmap calls for introduction of a text-independent version of AmorVox to debut in the first quarter of 2012. The new rev will also run on servers running 64-bit processors, interacting with SQL- or mySQL-based databases.
New Zealand’s Government Agencies Forge Ahead with Voice Biometrics-based Authentication
In this report by Tom Pullar-Strecker in the Waikato Times we learn that the New Zealand’s tax agency and unemployment department have “leapfrogged” the banks in terms of registering the voiceprints of their constituencies. In just four weeks, Inland Revenue (which is akin to the Internal Revenue Service in the U.S.) has enrolled 10,000 citizens and anticipates reaching 800,000 in a year. The Work and Income agency has enrolled 15,000 people since it launched voice-based authentication in July.
Both companies report that the fact that 38 percent of calls originate from mobile phones has presented a bit of a challenge. They are finding a decline in accuracy arising from the use of mobile phones, especially in noisy environments. Efforts by mobile carriers to make calls less “tinny” are expected to reduce error rates.
Nuance’s Steve Chambers to Deliver Keynote at Voice Biometrics Conference New York April 3rd & 4th, 2012
Planning for Opus Research’s 2012 Voice Biometrics Conference New York on April 3rd-4th is in full swing and we’re pleased to announce that Nuance’s President, Sales and Marketing, Steve Chambers, will deliver a keynote address during the event. He will share his perspectives on how speaker verification, accurate speech recognition and artificial intelligence will help enterprises to anticipate a user’s intent and establish a foundation of trusted communications. Bringing these technologies together will provide a balance of secure interactions and a positive user experiences across channels including, traditional phones, mobile devices and e-commerce Web-sites.
Register Now – Discounted Offer Ends November 30th:
The first 30 people to register for Voice Biometric Conference New York can register for $299.00 That’s over half off the full conference rate of 699.00. Use registration code, ‘earlyvbc’ to receive the special rate.
Nuance Survey Showcases Shortcomings of Multiple Mobile PINs and Passwords; Positions Voiceprints as Alternative
Nuance Communications issued a media alert revealing the results of a Twitter-based survey conducted over the past couple of weeks. Through the survey, the company sought to learn more about the general public’s exposure to the pain points created by cumbersome password management strictures and to gain insights into the attitudes that individuals have with respect to using their voiceprint as an alternative to multiple passwords.
Here are the important findings as reported by Nuance:
62 percent of respondents have more than 11 usernames and passwords, and that they forget their passwords between one and five times a month. Each time a password is forgotten it’s lost time that could be spent being more productive at work or at home. In addition, 74 percent of those surveyed have been blocked access to important information while using a mobile device because they could not remember their log-in information. The survey also found that 80 percent of respondents use the same password for multiple accounts if it fits the password criteria.
When viewed as a whole, the responses reveal that present solutions to mobile security are both inconvenient and insecure. There are no surprises in that. There should be no surprise in learning that 77 percent of respondents would be comfortable using voice biometrics as an alternative if it meant tighter security, and that a combination of voice and a password or PIN was preferred by 61 percent of those surveyed.
These findings are a significant upgrade from a survey conducted in 2009 by contactcentres.net in Australia and New Zealand. When asked about their preferred methods for identity verification, voice biometrics rated first, but only by 45% of participants, followed by PIN (21%), password (18%) and personal details or history questions (16%).
Nuance’s Twitter poll shows how dis-integrated our mobile identities have become. I fall into the category of individuals with well over 11 user names and password combinations across mobile communications and commerce sites. I was also one of the respondents who was locked out of a site after mis-remembering my password while trying to rebook a connecting flight through a mobile Web site. How I look forward to the day when I can use my voiceprint for more convenient authentication.
