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‘Voice biometrics will be the de
facto standard in 2-3 years’
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More than 65m voiceprints already on databases
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Barclays is rolling out voiceprint identification for its 12 million retail
banking customers. Photograph: Terry Waller/Demotix/Corbis
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Over the telephone, in jail and online, a new digital bounty is being
harvested: the human voice.
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Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to
voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track
criminals and replace passwords.
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“We sometimes call it the invisible biometric,” said Mike Goldgof, an
executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the
field.
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Those companies have helped enter more than 65m voiceprints into corporate
and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens
of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe
and elsewhere.
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“There’s a misconception that the technology we have today is only in the
domain of the intelligence services, or the domain of Star Trek,” said Paul
Burmester, of London-based ValidSoft, a voice biometric vendor. “The technology
is here today, well-proven and commonly available.”
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And in high demand.
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Dan Miller, an analyst with Opus Research in San Francisco, estimates that
the industry’s revenue will roughly double from just under $400m last year to
between $730m and $900m next year.
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Barclays plc recently experimented with voiceprinting as an identification for
its wealthiest clients. It was so successful that Barclays is rolling it out to
the rest of its 12 million retail banking customers.
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“The general feeling is that voice biometrics will be the de facto standard
in the next two or three years,” said Iain Hanlon, a Barclays executive.
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Vendors say the timbre of a person’s voice is unique in a way similar to
the loops and whorls at the tips of someone’s fingers.
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Their technology measures the characteristics of a person’s speech as air
is expelled from the lungs, across the vocal folds of the larynx, up the
pharynx, over the tongue, and out through the lips, nose and teeth. Typical
speaker recognition software compares those characteristics with data held on a
server. If two voiceprints are similar enough, the system declares them a
match.
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The Vanguard Group Inc, a Pennsylvania-based mutual fund manager, is among
the technology’s many financial users. Tens of thousands of customers log in to
their accounts by speaking the phrase: “At Vanguard, my voice is my password”
into the phone.
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“We’ve done a lot of testing, and looked at siblings, even twins,” said
executive John Buhl, whose voice was a bit hoarse during a telephone interview.
“Even people with colds, like I have today, we looked at that.”
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The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where
the mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10
million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance
Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up.
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In the US, law enforcement officials use the technology to monitor inmates
and track offenders who have been paroled.
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In New Zealand, the Internal Revenue Department celebrated its 1 millionth
voiceprint, leading the revenue minister to boast that his country had “the
highest level of voice biometric enrolments per capita in the world”.
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In South Africa, roughly 7m voiceprints have been collected by the
country’s Social Security Agency, in part to verify that those claiming
pensions are still alive.
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Activists worry that the popularity of voiceprinting has a downside.
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“It’s more mass surveillance,” said Sadhbh McCarthy, an Irish privacy
researcher. “The next thing you know, that will be given to border guards, and
you’ll need to speak into a microphone when you get back from vacation.”
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