However, John Brand, senior programme director with IT analyst group META Group, disagreed with Summerfield's 12-month prognosis, saying that the voice recognition market itself has only really taken off in the last couple of years. "We won't see enormous take-up of (speaker verification) in the next 12 months," he said. Brand stressed that combined with other technologies speaker verification makes sense, however by itself it's an extremely poor method of identification. "It's no more accurate in determining identification than using caller ID on the telephone," he said. Brand pointed out that there are a whole range of things that impact voice verification, such as colds and flus, medication, and stress -- most of which speaker verification technology is insensitive to. "As a verification mechanism, it's not that useful at this stage. Ultimately it will be, but that's still quite a way off," Brand said. "At this stage of the game I wouldn't want to bet the bank on it." Brand envisages authentication encompassing a number of different methods of determining identity, and therefore "I don't see any driving need for (speaker verification) in call centres," he said. "If you're trying to improve security, this is not going to do it...it may streamline processes slightly, but it's not going to improve security." Summerfield conceded that the technology is insensitive to certain conditions, such as colds and flus, but stressed that no biometric is perfect. "All biometrics can be fooled," he said, but "they can give you a certain level of protection more valuable that you already have manually." According to Summerfield, there are various strategies that can be set up so that a pre-recorded voice can't be used to fool the system. For example, several passwords can be recorded, which the individual may be required say in a random order. That way a pre-recording of a password can't as easily be used to fool the system. It gets to the stage where the cost of fooling system is higher than the benefit that would be yielded from fooling the system, Summerfield pointed out. However, Matt Jones, a director at call centre consultancy company Vivaz, believes call centres will struggle to get general acceptance of non-human interface transactions. According to Jones, voice recognition technologies are successful where they're used to give customers information such as stock price quotes, but as he pointed out, "Human behaviour is such that any transaction so significant to need precise authentication is probably a high-value transaction where human interaction is important." The problem, he said, is forcing people to use it. On the other side of the coin, Summerfield pointed out that with human intervention there is always an opportunity for human fraudulent activity and reducing the opportunity for fraud is a very strong message these days. "Speaker verification is not a complete panacea but will reduce the abilities for (fraud) to occur," he said. "We all have locks on our door but it doesn't take two minutes to go and get a key cut."
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