Verizon reports that 61% of breaches involved credentials in 2020. This includes passwords stolen through email account compromises and other forms of social engineering attacks, which were up 11% in 2020.

Unlike passwords, biometrics rely on something you are — not something you know.

What is Voice Authentication?

Voice authentication makes logins as easy as speaking. Voice and user speech can serve as a unique marker of a user’s ID. Voice authentication is a type of security authentication that relies on a person’s unique voice patterns for identification. Voice authentication should not be confused with speech recognition, which is about recognizing what is said rather than who is saying it.

This type of authentication requires a device that can capture a person’s voice very accurately and software that can recognize the patterns of the voice and compare it to already-recognized patterns.

Why is Voice Authentication Secure?

A person’s voice is extremely difficult to forge in terms of biometric comparison purposes because of its inherent uniqueness, which is also due to the myriad of unique measured qualities of the voice such as dialect, speaking style, pitch, format frequencies and spectral magnitudes.

A password or knowledge based information can be stolen, and a token can be copied or forged if security isn’t kept tight. This way someone else can impersonate if they get hold of the security credentials but with voice authentication, the intended person should be present and authenticated.

Knowledge based authentication is time consuming compared to voice authentication which increases the Average handling Time (AHT) in Contact Centers. At times, asking multiple knowledge based questions frustrates the callers and leads to brand damage.

Contact centers have constrained the actions like PIN reset, balance inquiry and transfers that can be completed in their IVRs because fraudsters and insiders have been so successful at repeatedly beating weak knowledge-based authentication with callers’ PII (Personally Identifiable Information). The value of PII has made large databases of consumer information irresistible to hackers.

What is Liveness Detection?

Liveness detection is a practice that exists specifically to fight spoofed biometric data. That is, to determine when a biometric piece of information is from a live person rather than a machine or algorithm (deep fakes or fake fingerprints, for example), it’s often necessary to use a liveness test.

In simplest terms, liveness is a method of programming user recognition that can detect whether or not a biometric piece of data is from a human rather than a bot. For example, these tests are meant to determine whether or not things like sound artifacts were actually spoken and not just from a file. In terms of biometrics and voice spoofing, researchers are learning how to develop deep learning solutions to address common deep fakes and spoofs.

How Voicera integrates Voice Authentication in its Contact Center Solutions?

Voicera is partnered with Twilio, one of the leading Cloud Telephony Platform and VoiceIt.io, a robust voice and video authentication service provider.

Using the technologies provided by telephony and voice authentication platform, Voicera has developed a easy to use contact center solution powered with voice authentication.

When callers call for the first time, they need to enroll their unique voiceprint with the system and they are all set! In order to ensure accuracy, callers speak a predefined voiceprint phrase for three times to enroll. Next time when callers call, they need to utter the same voiceprint to authenticate.

Our voice authentication solution uses Twilio Media Stream to establish web socket connection to voice authentication server hosting VoiceIt.io service for authentication. Twilio Media Stream fork the media of a phone call in real-time, effectively creating a copy of the initial audio stream. However, Voice Authentication has some drawbacks as well. A loud environment can impact authentication, and so can normal incidents including colds, sore throats or more minor changes in voice, accent or speech patterns. In order to overcome this challenge our solution is provides backup authentication solution using Twilio Authy – Two Factor and text based authentication for your applications.

About Voicera Analytics

Voicera Analytics Pvt Ltd (CloudPro Inc, Subsidiary) is a product and services company focused on business process transformation through the implementation of the Cloud Telephony CPaaS platform for SMB and Large Enterprise Customers with 100 seats to 5000 seat capacity Contact Center.

Voicera’s contact center products include Voicera Dialer Lite (VDL), Advanced Speech Attendant, Digital Pharmacy and Digital Credit Union.

Voicera provides strategic guidance and helps to migrate from Legacy telephony platforms (Avaya, Cisco, Aspect, Shoretel, Mitel, Siemens, Toshiba, Panasonic) to latest Cloud Telephony based (Nextiva, Twilio, Genesys PureCloud, Nice InContact, Ring Central and Five9) platforms and deliver better results to customer business.