The 2011 Market Leaders
VOICE SECURITY
The Market
Growing demand for voice biometrics in general and voice-based identification in particular signals the emergence of a market segment that is expected to hit a sudden and rapid growth spurt in the very near future, according to many industry observers.
Roughly 6.5 million people around the world now have their voiceprints stored by commercial organizations for voice authentication, Opus Research estimates. Nuance Communications expects that number to reach 20 million in about two years. Among the top industries using such data are telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and government, with “modest successes” in some other areas, according to Dan Miller, research director at Opus.
“The market is poised to grow dramatically,” Miller says, pointing out that one of the main drivers in voice security applications is mobile phones. As people are able to do more and more with their telephones, the need to authenticate themselves before carrying out transactions will grow, Miller predicts.
In addition, look for voice biometrics to be included as part of a trend toward multifactor authentication schemes and e-signature verification, he says.
The Leaders
Speech Technology Center has been on a roll since it announced a year ago that the world’s first nationwide automatic voice identification system based on its proprietary biometric platform will help Mexican law enforcement agencies collect, manage, and search a database of hundreds of thousands of stored voiceprints. STC already is negotiating similar systems deployments in Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Beyond that, the company also garnered top spots in cost and customer satisfaction, where it collected scores of 4.0.
VoiceVault, a company focused exclusively on the science and technology of voice biometrics, was a winner in 2008, but then dropped off the leaderboard for a few years, Now it’s back, having finished particularly well in company expertise and ease of use, where it scored 4.3 and 4.0, respectively.
The company has taken the lead in voice security applications for the smartphone market, which many industry analysts have identified as the next frontier for voice security, and is working with many other industry partners to pair voice biometrics as part of a larger multimodal identity verification solution. The company also boasts simple and quick enrollment processes, the ability to draw accurate results from short utterances, and technology that is both text- and language-independent.
The Winner
When Nuance Communications acquired PerSay, the former knew it was getting a leader in voice security; PerSay was the clear winner in the category in 2010 and 2009. The acquisition, which Nuance pulled off in late December, has positioned the company far atop the leader board in the voice security space.
Nuance also gained text-independent authentication and authentication on iPhones. As a result, Nuance’s customer base expanded to include some of the largest known customer-facing authentication applications in the world, including Bell Canada and Vodafone Turkey. However, the true benefit Nuance gains from the acquisition is a new level of expertise, exemplified by its perfect 5.0 score in that area. Nuance also finished far ahead of the competition in its accuracy score, 4.4.
Vendor Contender
TradeHarbor first expanded the reach of voice-based authentication using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model in 1999, and those efforts are finally paying off. Now a leading provider of voice authentication as a Web service, the company’s customers are apparently pretty pleased, as TradeHarbor scored a 4.0 in customer satisfaction.
The company hopes to expand its customer base with the recent addition of a Quick Start program for cable and entertainment content providers; the program includes free integration support and free use of the Voice Signature Service, indicative of its confidence that users will see a significant return on investment from the service. TradeHarbor also scored high in ease of use and company expertise with marks of 4.0.
—Leonard Klie
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