From speaker verification in an interactive voice response (IVR) banking application to employee time tracking and verification, voice recognition and verification is slowly gaining momentum as higher levels of authentication/verification are being required in this age of Internet and VoIP communications.

Speaker verification or recognition is a process of authenticating speaker’s claimed identity by comparing his/her voice with previously recorded or computed speech characteristics, voiceprint, which is as unique as finger print. Unlike speech recognition, which has been around for sometime, speaker verification is relatively recent addition to IVR systems.

Curently, IVR systems have been authenticating its caller with a password or PIN ( Personal Identification Number) by pressing telephone keys or using digital tone multi frequency (DTMF) or even speech recognition. Going forward, speaker verification will be incorporated in IVR systems for caller authentication. In this emerging scheme, IVR caller will be asked to speak a random phrase which will be compared with caller’s existing voice print. The process will match the two patterns for authentication.

What are the advantages? First, the caller does not have to remember any 4-digit or 5-digit PIN code, which is periodically changed. Second, it is a much faster process that requires the caller to speak any phrase randomly. Speaker verification with speech recognition can be a fool proof combination for user authentication.

By comparison to other biometric technologies like fingerprints, irises, and facial patterns, voice verification is the least invasive and can be used over phone lines.

A company playing a key role in advancing this art is Interact, Inc.  Further augmenting IVR solutions with voice verification, Interact is bringing its enhanced IVR systems to security firms, geocode mapping, geographical location services, and fraud prevention across different industries.

Personalization is another extension of speaker verification, enabling IVR to greet  customers by name and provide customized service for each caller, said Interact. As for IVR in the cloud, Interact does have a hosted base solution.