IVRs Seek Tighter Security

Voxeo, a provider of IVR systems, and VoiceVerified, a provider of voice biometric technology, announced today a partnership in which VoiceVerified will deliver voice authentication technology to new and existing customers of Voxeo’s hosted IVR service.

This partnership follows the nearly year-long trend of increasing customer-facing deployments of voice biometrics technology. In February, Telisma and PerSay created a partnership integrating the former’s speech recognition solution with the latter’s voice biometrics technology. In October 2007, Opus Research published a report demonstrating strong growth in the field, largely due to increased use of unified communications (UC) and customer mobility. 

"With increasing threats on the privacy of personal information, more companies will adopt additional security measures to protect customers from fraud, but will want to maintain customer convenience," Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. "Voice biometric authentication represents a promising technology in this regard.

The partnership between Voxeo and VoiceVerified allows enterprise customers to quickly deploy voice authentication as a contact center security measure. Callers accessing an application with VoiceVerified’s solution are asked to repeat five randomly generated numbers. That response is compared to a stored voiceprint to authenticate the caller’s identity. 

"Voxeo’s goal is to make telephony safe for our customers," said John Amein, senior vice president of Strategic Partnerships at Voxeo.  "Using voice as a security method is a great way to make life easier for customers and callers alike."