Vocal support for identity

[Dave Birch] I saw an interesting presentation about using voice biometrics for password reset, which seemed to work pretty well.  You force people to change their passwords more frequently, but make it easy for them to reset the passwords when they (inevitably) forget them.  The one-to-one matching of voiceprints of people talking on mobile phones had a false reject of 0.46%, which seemed a little high for the mass market but heading in the right direction and probably acceptable for corporate use if it can make a substantial reduction in the costs of providing help desk support for password management (which is what many corporates seem to mean by "identity management").

Technorati Tags: biometrics, mobile

Never mind fingerprints and iris scans, voice will be the mainstream biometrics of the future, won’t it? In India, of the mobile operators has just issued a tender to procure a system that will enable its 20 million mobile users across the country to send SMS by using their voice.  As part of a 2FA/3FA scheme, voice looks like a practical way forward.

I’m sure, in fact, that the role of voice is underestimated because of all of the focus in the ID world on fingerprints, face and iris.  If we accept the premise that the no.1 "interaction" device for the foreseeable future will be the mobile phone then the obvious synergies between voice recognition and voice authentication technologies and mobile phones will dominate.  I recall doing a study for a client a couple of years ago and considering how small advances in voice technologies will disproportionately large impact in the particular value network we were examining and I suspect that this dynamic may be more generally applicable.

My opinions are my own (I think) and are presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public.
[posted with ecto]