Leveraging Technology

PerSay and telisma Combine the Power of Speech Recognition and Voice Biometrics

PerSay has teamed up with telisma (Paris, France) (www.telisma.com), a leader in network speech recognition technology, to provide more comprehensive voice solutions for customers.

Telisma makes it easier for partners and customers to deploy speech technologies in multiple languages across various countries via its speech recognition software, teliSpeech. "Our partnership with PerSay will enable us to broaden the availability of our speech recognition solutions worldwide, and provide customers with the most accurate and cost-effective speaker verification technology available, "said Laurent Balaine, CEO of telisma. "We're pleased about this relationship with PerSay, and confident that it will create mutual advantages for both companies and their customers."

"Telisma joins an impressive and continually expanding group of PerSay partners worldwide, enabling us to capitalize on market opportunities and bring the most advanced voice biometric solutions to more customers around the globe," remarked Ariel Freidenberg, Executive VP, Global Sales and Business Development at PerSay. "Telisma has significantly increased its market share in Europe, and its ASR technology is now available in 10 Indian languages, enabling another emerging market to realize the benefits of the most advanced voice biometrics solutions available today." PerSay integrates telisma’s speech recognition engine with its product portfolio to deliver customized voice-enabled solutions to customers.

PerSay and Philips First to Marry Voice Biometrics
and Biometric Encryption

PerSay and Philips (The Netherlands) (www.philips.com) have made significant progress in developing, applying and evaluating privacy-enhancing technology that successfully combines voice biometrics with biometric encryption.

Background
Last year, PerSay launched the largest customer-facing deployment of voice biometrics at Bell Canada, with over 500,000 enrollments and 1.4 million verifications by the end of 2007. During this engagement, Bell contacted Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, shortly after the release of her paper, Biometric Encryption: A Positive-Sum Technology that Achieves Strong Authentication, Security AND Privacy, to inform her of PerSay’s work in voice biometrics. Her familiarity with Philips’ biometric encryption technology led her to believe that the two companies working together held high promise for protecting privacy while improving consumer services. She urged Philips and PerSay to collaborate in an effort to integrate biometric encryption with voice biometrics.

When Philips applied its biometric encryption to PerSay’s voice biometrics, the performance of the combined technologies remained at a world-class level with respect to accuracy, as well as enhancing invaluable privacy and security benefits. PerSay recently added the Philips priv-ID™ engine to the Version 6.0 release of its products portfolio.

Philips Private Identity Matching Fast, convenient and secure ID verification Enhanced privacy Anonymous and revocable biometric identifiers Multiple unique identifiers from one biometric Flexible implementation: multimodal and vendor neutral Scalable architecture supporting multiple applications Advanced one-way encryption (biometric info cannot be reverse engineered) Convenient secure access to private information and personalized services Small footprint identifiers that can be stored on low-cost media

Applications for the Merged Technologies
One of the applications being explored for this technology involves remote voice authentication. In standard remote authentication architectures, the customer’s voiceprint is collected at the remote terminal and is then sent to the processing server. The processing server compares the voiceprint with the stored template/biometric and sends the result back to the terminal. With biometric encryption, the process can be turned around—the biometrically encrypted template is sent to the terminal instead of sending the voiceprint to the server. The comparison is then done at the terminal, with no audio being sent over the network. This substantially reduces the footprint of the voice template, enabling deployment of voice biometrics across all channels, including mobile devices. In fact, PerSay is currently developing embedded speaker verification capabilities for cell phones and other mobile devices.

Commissioner Cavoukian is especially supportive of such technology because it allows for enhanced security and privacy. The Commissioner believes, “We are on the cusp of making a truly positive-sum solution a reality through the use of voice biometrics—an approach that enhances both the privacy and security of a biometric, in this case, your voice, which happens to be a unique and unobtrusive form of identification. I am absolutely delighted with this development.”

PerSay Version 6.0 Speaker Verification Products Deliver Enhanced Security for Remote Access and Call Center Applications

PerSay recently announced the official release of its Version 6.0 speaker verification platform, featuring enhanced security to address the evolving challenges of delivering remote services via contact centers and the Internet.

Recognized as the most accurate, convenient and cost-effective speaker verification technology, PerSay’s robust portfolio of text-dependent and text-independent solutions is easy to deploy and seamlessly integrates with existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and VoiceXML platforms, CTI systems and monitoring centers.

With a primary focus on security, the improved platform, based on existing .Net and Windows technology, underwent rigorous evaluation by third-party security experts to map potential vulnerabilities of every component and ensure the best possible protection against security threats and breaches. All three of PerSay’s core products benefit from the updated platform.

Seeking maximum security and ensured regulatory compliance, PerSay’s 6.0 voice biometric speaker verification platform has been selected by leading financial services, telecom providers and security organizations, as well as IVR/voice platform suppliers and system integrators worldwide.

Link to press release