Could you use your voice to authenticate purchases or money transfers? That’s what Nuance Communications, which specializes in voice-based AI technology, feels. We can already use our fingerprints to authorize purchases on our smartphones, and Nuance believes that voice biometrics can add an additional layer of security.
Jason Stirling, SVP at Nuance Communications, believes voice biometrics should be much more popular than they are today. “In nine seconds, this technology can identify whether a person is who they claim to be,” Stirling says. He’s talking about voice print identification, a crucial aspect of voice biometrics. Basically that’s what stops the voice assistant AI from ordering a dollhouse you don’t want just because a random person asked it to.
“Voice biometrics isn’t bulletproof but it has many layers of authentication,” Stirling says. Nuance has a technology called liveness detection that basically acts as a safeguard against someone playing a recording of your voice to masquerade as you. You are asked to speak a unique pass phrase every time you log in, making it harder for fraudsters to impersonate you.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US suggested in 2016 that SMS-based two-factor authentication is not secure and should be done away with. Having it enabled is better than not having any form of two-factor authentication, but Stirling suggests it’s time online services used voice biometrics for a third layer of security, or as an alternative to app-based OTPs.
That’s not to say that voice biometrics is the future and should immediately replace all other forms of security. It has a whole bunch of problems that need to be fixed Japan’s NEC corporation is also working on its own biometrics technology, based on video face recognition. NIST testing of the technology has been quite positive.
Video face recognition technology identifies the faces of moving subjects in real-time as they walk naturally without stopping in front of a camera. Face recognition technology has also been around for a while – you can log into some phones and Windows PCs with your face – but these aren’t foolproof.
Using video images from standard cameras for face recognition requires highly-advanced techniques when compared to still images, NEC explains. This is because images are greatly influenced by environmental conditions, such as camera location, image quality, lighting and subject size, in addition to the behavior of a subject, including walking speed, face direction and sight line.
