The 2015 Speech Industry Star Performers: SpeechPro

SpeechPro Closes the Gap on Mobile Apps

In 2014, SpeechPro, a provider of speech recording, processing, analytics, and biometrics technologies, stated its plans to focus on mobility, the Web, and multimodal applications. And in short order, the company has delivered.

In September, it launched VoiceKey.WebAccess, enabling users to access Web applications, corporate networks, or online accounts simply by speaking a short passphrase and capturing an image of their face. VoiceKey.WebAccess uses a triple biometric process that combines more than 70 voice features, more than 40 facial features, and liveness testing to confirm each person's identity, but authentication takes just a few seconds to complete.

Then in late May, SpeechPro inked a deal with FaceBanx, a provider of biometric security technology, to further expand its VoiceKey.OnePass technology in the mobile market. FaceBanx offers VoiceKey.OnePass as an add-on to its mobile phone, PC, and tablet solution. The combined solution lets users log in to mobile apps using voice and face authentication.

"One of the key requirements for our customers is being able to choose from a number of different biometric solutions to offer their customers," Matthew Silverstone, CEO of Facebanx, said in a statement at the time.

SpeechPro's technology is already deployed in more than 75 countries worldwide, and through some other key partnerships forged this year, the company is positioning itself where a lot of new customers can find it.

For example, a partnership with CallMiner, announced in May, adds SpeechPro's speaker separation capabilities to CallMiner's Eureka speech analytics product suite. This technology, the hallmark of SpeechPro's VoiceGrid product series, separates speakers in a recorded conversation, improving the depth and detail of speech analysis available for call centers.

According to Alexey Khitrov, president of SpeechPro, most legacy call recording equipment keeps the agent and the customer in the same channel. "That makes it tough for the analytics, because you can't always tell who is speaking," he says. SpeechPro's VoiceGrid can work with up to five speakers on the same channel at once.

In addition to the CallMiner pairing, SpeechPro struck a deal with Aspect to make VoiceKey available through the Aspect Innovation Exchange, a marketplace of applications built by Aspect's internal research and development team, customers, and partners. The partnership, announced in September 2014, has also led to VoiceKey's integration with Aspect's Prophecy IVR platform.

Mike Moors, Aspect's vice president of worldwide channels, expects SpeechPro to play a big part of Aspect's success, helping to make the Innovation Exchange "a robust entry point for groundbreaking customer engagement and care solutions, including mobile and omnichannel capabilities."

SpeechPro's VoiceKey was already available through Avaya's DevConnect, an online marketplace for customers to integrate third-party products and solutions, following a deal the two companies announced in mid-2014.

Khitrov says the partnerships continue the momentum SpeechPro has been building in the past year or so. The company already tripled its U.S. sales in 2014, and Khitrov sees even more growth ahead. "We're seeing a lot of activity around voice biometrics, and that will be great for the market and for our company," he says. "The growth and adoption of voice biometrics in general shows growing interest in the technology, alone or in conjunction with other modalities."

SpeechPro's strength lies in its simplicity, Khitrov adds. "We keep it very simple for the user, while greatly increasing security. We present an easy alternative to other offerings, and people are responding very well to us."