Concept of Conversational Biometrics

Conversational Biometrics(CB) technology enables a non-intrusive and highly accurate mechanism for determining and authenticating user identities, based on the analysis of their voice. Unlike other biometrics, voice contains multiple sources of information that can be acquired using existing ubiquitous infrastructure and used for recognizing and verifying user identities. The primary source is the user’s voiceprint, which can be analyzed purely from an acoustic perspective, without considering the content being spoken. In addition to the voiceprint, voice also contains information on user’s knowledge, and with an integrated conversational interface, the samevoice can be analyzed twice: once for voiceprint match, and again for knowledge match. Consequently, the authentication process can be made arbitrarily accurate (with false acceptance rates below 10E-12 %), while retaining all desirable features of voice biometrics such as naturalness, convenience and non-intrusiveness. Conversational biometrics does not need any additional client hardware (unlike other biometrics such as fingerprint which require specialized sensors) since PC microphones and telephones (including mobile phones) are everywhere, and thus it is extremely suitable for security management in pervasive devices at a very low cost. For example, in wireless applications (WAP, voice portal, etc.) such as e-banking, e-commerce, and applications that involve private information, conversational biometrics provides extremely high security protection against fraud, when such high security is mandated by the transaction. When the transactions require higher degree of flexibility instead, conversational biometrics supports dynamic policy generation to enable very low false rejections rates as well. Moreover, unlike other authentication mechanisms, conversational biometrics supports incremental authentication, background authentication and transaction-specific authentication, thus resulting in a truly comprehensive authentication framework. Given the strength and flexibility, conversational biometrics is clearly a major market differentiator.