Hi Johnny, You have to differentiate between speech recognition and voice print verification..
Speech recognition (also known as speech-to-text) is hard to do well, and in my experience falls apart when confronted with (simultaneously) large vocabularies and speakers with various and different accents. I don't mean that as flame bait -- I just haven't seen a very good deployment that responds well to these two challenges at the same time. That said, we do have at least one customer implementing self-service password reset on a large scale (tens of thousands of users in a financial institution) using speech recognition. I'm not very familiar with their situation, so I can't personally vouch for the effectiveness of their system. This customer did not source the IVR or voice recognition technology from us -- just the password reset system, so I can't even point you to the vendor offhand, but I could find out for you if you like (contact me offline if so). Voice print verification is different -- it doesn't attempt to "understand" what the speaker is saying, just verify whether the person saying it is the same as the person that provided an earlier sample of the same phrase, using the same type of telephone device (i.e., 1 sample per phrase per desk phone, cell phone, etc.). It's fairly straightforward to tune a voice print verification engine (and indeed any biometric) to yield essentially zero false-positive errors. This does have the side-effect of increasing the rate of false-negative errors (i.e., when speaker A attempts to authenticate himself, against a stored sample of speaker A, the system fails to recognize him). This is not a security problem - just a nuisance and a cost problem, due to escalation. Voice print verification works quite well in practice -- we source an excellent engine to embed in our P-Synch password reset software from Voice Vantage, and at least one of our customers has successfully deployed a solution with technology they sourced from Nuance. We have a customer who has realized cost savings of about US$6 million/year using this technology, so I think it's fair to call it "ready for prime time." Obviously, you should limit any sort of self-service password reset solution to non-privileged users - this has nothing to do with the voice engine, and everything to do with stronger controls for more sensitive users. For example, ignoring the voice application for a moment, a normal user who forgot his password might be authenticated with mother's maiden name, date of birth, employee number, driver's license number, etc. On the other hand, an administrator might be required to use a two-factor device (e.g., SecurID) or to speak to another administrator and be personally recognized. Good luck! -- Idan Shoham Chief Technology Officer M-Tech Information Technology, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mtechIT.com **************************************************************************** For more information on M-Tech's Regulatory Compliance Solution visit: http://mtechIT.com/compliance/ **************************************************************************** The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this email by anyone else is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. **************************************************************************** On Thu, 10 Aug 2006, Figueroa, Johnny wrote:
There is talk about using a home grown speech recognition system to reset a user's password. You would need to enroll, the system would record your voice and if you ever wanted to reset your password, it would ask you to repeat a word of its choice. The system would use a service account with the ability to reset passwords and turn on the option to force the user to reset the password at logon. I am just sending this out to get some feedback. I would have a challenge trying to exclude certain groups from being able to do this, like IT folks with elevated credentials. Unfortunately those IT folks are in the same OU as the users that want this functionality. Thoughts on any part of this? Thanks Johnny Figueroa Supervisor Network Operations & Support Network Services Banner Health Voice (602) 747-4195 Fax (602) 747-4406 WARNING: This message, and any attachments, are intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient or employee/agent responsible for delivering the message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of the communication is strictly prohibited. If you receive this communication in error, please notify us immediately
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