Nuance Will Power Turkcell's Voice Signature Service

Nuance Communications' advanced voice biometrics product, VocalPassword, is being used in Global Bilgi’s ‘Voice Signature’ service for Turkcell, the leading mobile phone carrier in Turkey. 

VocalPassword verifies callers based on their individual voiceprints. The service allows Turkcell subscribers to use the personal biometric characteristics of their voices to conduct transactions. The identification approval is done automatically, reducing call handling by 20 seconds for individual subscribers and 40 seconds for corporate subscribers. 

“Given that VocalPassword so accurately captures the complex voice characteristics of each enrolled individual, our voiceprints are infinitely more secure tokens than a credit card number or a PIN. Voice is also the only biometric that can be verified remotely over any phone, making it the most convenient biometric to use,” said Dan Faulkner, vice president ofr product management and marketing at Nuance. “We are very pleased by the success of Turkcell’s service. It clearly helps them to make identification and verification more convenient, faster, and more secure for their customers.”  

“We first launched this system for a limited number of subscribers, but it attracted more attention than we had expected and reached 2 million users in a short time," says Fahri Arkan, assistant general manager of information technologies at Turkcell. "Customers like the very simple and fast authentication process of only five seconds.”  

Nuance has a long standing relationship with Global Bilgi to deploy speech solutions in Turkey. Already in 2009 Turkcell offered the first fully speech-enabled service in Turkey to provide a new payment system that offered Turkcell’s pre-paid subscribers an interface based on Nuance speech technology for purchasing additional call units with their credit cards.