Nuance Advances Voice Biometrics Portfolio through Launch of VocalPassword and FreeSpeech

Nuance Communications today announced Version 7.0 of Nuance VocalPassword and Nuance FreeSpeech, which provide underlying technology for the world’s largest customer-facing voice biometrics deployments. These solutions handle millions of voiceprints and help address the security demands of leading financial institutions, telecom service providers, healthcare providers, enterprises, and law enforcement and government agencies.

Nuance’s enhanced voice biometrics portfolio draws on the innovation and technology leadership of PerSay, a voice biometric company that Nuance acquired in 2010. The combination has accelerated innovation and the benefits that customers can achieve from deploying voice biometric solutions, including customer identification and verification across contact center, mobile devices and internet application environments. Further, these voice biometric solutions help businesses address critical security requirements such as risk management, regulatory compliance, and fraud and identify theft.

Nuance’s VocalPassword targets automated remote verification based on an individual’s voice, while Nuance FreeSpeech performs verification and fraud detection in the background of conversations between callers and agents in the contact center.

“Enterprises have long been interested in the promise of voice biometrics to improve security and customer satisfaction,” said Ryan Joe, associate analyst at Ovum Research. “By acquiring PerSay, Nuance has gained significant technology assets, bolstering its own capabilities to deliver solutions that ensure a personalized and secure user experience.”

“At Bank Leumi, safeguarding our customers from fraud and providing a positive customer experience is of number one importance to us,” added Zahi Ovdat, head of contact centers project administration. “Through the new capabilities delivered in VocalPassword 7.0, we will be able to provide enhanced accuracy and secure all our customer interactions via multi-factor authentication.”

“The combination of Nuance and PerSay is exciting for us, as we are now able to deliver the next generation of secure voice biometrics solutions, the first of many to the market,” stated Dan Faulkner, vice president of product management and marketing at Nuance. “Integrating the new versions of VocalPassword and FreeSpeech into the Nuance portfolio underscores our commitment to help businesses ensure secure, convenient interactions and transactions in the global commerce and customer service marketplace.”

Nuance VocalPassword employs a multi-engine capability that will enable the support of the legacy verification product Nuance Verifier 4, and will enable existing customers to seamlessly migrate their applications to the new product line.

Nuance’s voice biometrics platform delivers an array of new capabilities:

• It provides text-dependent, text-independent, and text-prompted engines to deliver higher accuracy and flexibility.
• It prevents identity theft via new fraud detection and its ability to mitigate interception and vhishing (voice phishing).
• It delivers advanced tools for configuration and setup, system monitoring, and other day-to-day activities, such as end-user support.
• It supports integrated security, with role-based authorization now containing an improved encryption mechanism that supports custom (customer-provided) encryption.
• It supports full multitenancy, enabling a single system to support multiple voice biometrics applications using different algorithmic engines and configuration setting.
• A new installation kit supports multi-server, multi-site and high-availability deployments and a flexible licensing mechanism.