Month: March 2023

Voice biometrics technologies are already so developed that literally a dozen or so seconds of speech are enough for the system to recognize whether the person who wants to authenticate is who he claims to be. More and more perfect biometric systems, including voice recognition and synthesis, begin to gain in value every year in the context of their common applications. More and more research is being conducted on the development of biometric technologies. The forecasted biometrics market, according to “Biometric System Market in the Global Forecast to 2022 report”, last year reached USD 32.5 billion and we can expect its further growth. The premise for this is, for example, the latest agenda of the US Government, which encourages investment in modern solutions of identity verification based on biometrics. The main reason is the security and availability that these solutions can offer.

It is not without reason that biometric solutions, mainly based on a fingerprint, face or iris scanning, were the first to be used in financial institutions to confirm identity. We are talking about logging in to the mobile application or the recently introduced authorization of payments using fingerprints (biometric card implemented by Bank Pocztowy). Some banks, in accordance with the latest trends, are becoming more and more interested in voice biometrics. Trust in voice authentication is growing. The research shows that 50% of the society is convinced of this form of authorization. There are tests and first implementations (Bank Zachodni WBK, present Santander). Voice biometrics convinces with a high level of security and the possibility of using it in remote channels, without access to the office. It is these two factors that may determine the use of voice biometrics for payment authorization in the near future. This is confirmed by experts from EY, who claim that the universality of voice payments will depend on the readiness of technology and measures ensuring 100% security and privacy.

Is voice biometrics reserved only for banks? Well, nothing could be more wrong. More and more institutions and companies from the trade, health, property protection and even media sectors will decide to implement voice biometric systems. Being modern, using the latest trends and available technologies based on neural networks is not only a privilege but a necessity in building a competitive offer, gaining and retaining customers. The spread of remote channels and new forms of online service, such as v-commerce (voice shopping), are additional factors driving the development of voice biometrics. Guarantee of security of this type of solutions, availability and at the same time naturalness of use and convenience mean that investments in services based on voice biometrics can only pay off.

Orange and T-Mobile telecoms know this, as they were the first in Poland to implement voice technology on hotlines, focusing on comfort and significantly reducing service costs. The voice authentication of the orange operator is used by tens of thousands of individual customers. The Turkish operator Turkcell can also boast of implementation on a larger scale, reaching several million users.

Emirates with the advent of the pandemic at Dubai Airport introduced smart, contactless airport experience based on facial and iris recognition technology. This is how Emirates passengers can check in before their flight, complete immigration formalities, access the lounge and board the aircraft. Biometric boarding based on facial recognition has also been used by Brazilian carriers GOL and LATAM for almost a year at 3 airports in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Santos Dumont. The implementation of voice biometrics in this area seems to be only a matter of time.
Airports are one of the places that, due to the service of a huge number of passengers, will strive to automate the service process and implement more and more modern ways of fast, safe and convenient service for passengers – the combination of face or iris scanning technology with the unique feature of the voice can significantly improve the passenger experience. Voice as a non-contact form of authorization has a chance to work best here.

Voice biometrics can also come to quite unusual industries, such as the hotel industry or gastronomy. Due to the growing labor costs of economy hotels in connection with the reduction of the human factor as well as the growing trend of spontaneous travel, remote forms of self-service (self-check-in technologies) will become more and more popular. It is therefore possible that in a few or a dozen or so years, the guest will check in using a smartphone and open the hotel door with her voice.

Advanced voice biometrics systems are also an excellent “weapon” to fight online abuses based on voice, effectively preventing its theft. The emerging algorithms are already able to distinguish an artificial voice from a real one with almost 100% certainty.

In fact, it can be said that voice biometrics will eventually appear in every aspect of our lives. because speech is the most natural mechanism of communication between people. It is estimated that the global voice biometrics market will increase even 3 times by 2024.

sources: newseria.pl, ryneklotniczy.pl, spiderweb.pl, infowire.pl, own studies

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Just entering the password for the user when logging in may not be enough. More and more frequent attacks in the cyber network aimed at identity theft have made it necessary to strengthen the protection of existing authorization methods. Multi-factor authentication has become widespread. Banks and other payment institutions, in order to improve security, have been obliged under the PSD2 Directive *) to introduce strong multi-factor authentication (at least two-stage), which, due to its effectiveness, is also used to secure accounts and systems not only in banks.

What is multi-factor authentication?

Multi-factor authentication (most often used as two-factor authentification (2FA) is an effective method of securing accounts by using an additional verification factor in addition to the password.
The point is that after traditional authorization, we are talking about logging in with a username and password, additional authentication is required in a different way, independent of the previous method, by means of additional identifying elements. Such an element can be a USB key or biometric features – fingerprints, pupil, face and voice. Available research shows that from the point of view of online criminals, it is biometric security that is much more difficult to circumvent. Thanks to the high reliability of biometric systems, this type of authentication has a chance to develop the fastest.

VoiceToken as one of the multi-factor authorization methods

While touch biometrics in the form of fingerprints or face scanning have already settled in our lives for good, voice authentication is still not as common as we would like. For no reason at all, because multi-factor authentication, which uses voice, is a very strong type of authorization. This is the case with the VoiceToken solution, an original idea of ​​BiometrIQ. VoiceToken authentication provides double authentication. While the words are spoken, the compliance of the read words (first step) with the pattern as well as the biometric compatibility of the speaker’s voice with his VoicePrint (second step) are verified at the same time.
Extremely high security is ensured by the proprietary algorithm for selecting words to be read, which reduces the possibility of guessing the sequence of words that will be displayed on the screen to almost zero. The Speech To Text (STT) mechanism combined with an innovative biometric engine guarantees high effectiveness, even in the case of attacks based on speech synthesis. Read more about VoiceToken.

Some see multi-factor authentication as inconvenient, but from a security standpoint it is desirable. It protects us more strongly against hacker attacks than previous solutions. Password theft will not result in account access as the second authentication factor will take care of that. It is worth being aware that we can also use multi-factor authentication to protect social media accounts. In order to use this type of protection, it is enough to enable this function in the system settings of the account.

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*) From 2019, pursuant to the European Commission’s Directive on Payment Services (PSD2), banks and payment service providers are required to use strong customer authentication (SCA). The goal is to increase the security of online transactions, a higher level of credibility and resistance to frauds.

According to the bank.pl, strong customer authentication (SCA) “is a mechanism that aims to increase the security of payment transactions. To implement them, the payment service provider (e.g. bank) is required to use a method consisting of at least two elements belonging to the categories: knowledge (something only the user knows), possession (something only the user has) and customer characteristics (something only the user is). compromising one of them will not weaken the credibility of the others”.

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