TradeHarbor and Voxeo Announce Voice Authentication Partnership

TradeHarbor, a provider of voice authentication services, and Voxeo are partnering to deliver TradeHarbor's Voice Signature Service to customers using Voxeo's interactive voice response (IVR) services.

Voice Signature Service—a voice biometrics solution—works as a web service with Voxeo's Prophecy IVR Platform and is easily added to any call center or phone system using Voxeo's hosted IVR service.

“They’ve made it very easy to integrate with Prophecy,” says Dan York, director of conversations at Voxeo. “It’s a VoiceXML subdialog basically that can go and do the authentication component.”

According to York, when an enrolled user calls an application protected with Voice Signature Service, he is prompted to repeat a phrase—one from a large lexicon of phrases—to authenticate the call.  If the user is logging in to a Website, the service can initiate a call out to the Voxeo platform which connects to TradeHarbor to provide the site with authentication and needed information. 

York says the partnership will offer Voxeo customers a scalable, on-demand solution—through TradeHarbor—that is easy to integrate with either hosted or on-premise offerings of Voxeo software.

“It’s a simple integration with the existing services that lets Voxeo customers add these types of services into their existing apps,” he says. “So if they’ve got an app now—and it could be anything from banks and finances to password reset to [human resources]—if they’d like to provide some kind of authentication or identification for somebody to go through, this is a great way to go at it.”

When assessing the marketplace, York sees banks and financial institutions looking to move beyond simple methods of verification such as user name and password.  This, he says, is something voice verification can provide.

“Something that you know, something that you have, and something that you are, [those] are the things in security when you talk about passwords,” York says. “Something you know is a password, something you have is a token or a secure ID card…and something that you are is your fingerprint, your retina, your voiceprint.”

“It’s hard to spoof those things,” he adds.
 
According to York—who calls the partnership a "natural fit"—Voxeo and TradeHarbor currently have some joint customers who have expressed interest in the service.

“Stay tuned,” York says.