Customers of Australia’s ANZ bank will soon be able to make higher value transactions on their mobile devices by authenticating the payment using their voice. “Previously customers needed to use internet banking or visit a branch to complete transactions of more than $1000,” ANZ says. The bank is using technology supplied by Nuance to enable the feature, which will be trialled by ANZ employees in May, with a wider rollout planned “from the middle of this year”.
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Speaker verification has been one of my favorite forms of authentication since the seventies when I participated in an early experiment in it. While we proved what even infants know, i.e., that every speaker is unique, it proved to be infeasible then because of microphone differences, network distortion, and processing speed. The mobile phone is a natural for it. One microphone, no network, and power to burn.
Visage or facial recognition is equally suited to mobile. Unlike signatures, fingerprints or DNA, ordinary people are as good or better at recognizing voices and faces as computers or experts.
All mobiles come with microphones, and most now have user facing cameras that can be used for recognizing faces or eyes. My little three branch community bank that already offered TouchID on iPhone recently quietly deployed “Eyedenify” for iOS and Android.
Will wonders never cease.