Featured below is a special guest column written by Judith Markowitz, Ph.D. In addition to being a columnist for Speech Technology Magazine, she is also an independent analyst in the speech and voice biometrics fields. She can be reached at judith@jmarkowitz.com. She attended and spoke at the Voice BioCon in NYC last week, and sent us some of her impressions of the show.

The theme of the Opus Research Voice Biometrics Conference was “connecting the dots.” In his conference keynote Dan Miller made it clear that the dots Opus wanted to connect were business and market. Then, Miller established the groundwork for those connections by advocating that all segments of the industry view voice biometrics from a broad, business perspective. “Remember,” he said, “technology does not equal product, and product does not equal solution.”

[Click "More" for the rest of Dr. Markowitz's report.]

The individual sessions of the two-day conference identified specific “dots” to be connected. Organizations helping to connect those dots included customers, leading voice-biometrics vendors (Agnitio, Diaphonics, Nuance, Persay, Trade Harbor, Voice Vault, Voice Verified), integrators (Authentify, Cyberstorm, Fluency, Intervoice), and analysts. One series of sessions, dubbed the “great debates,” focused on specific functional and operational choices: premises-based vs. hosted deployment, text-independent vs. text-dependent interaction, and customer satisfaction vs. security emphasis.

A panel of representatives from four financial services organizations (Bankinter, Chase Card Services, CIBC, and Pershing) and a case study session on Bell Canada’s nationwide deployment provided examples of how these and other choices are made in the context of complex enterprises. The final session added another dot-connecting layer by addressing the topic of end-to-end solutions.

The keynote on identity theft by James Jackson and Bob Sullivan was compelling. Sullivan is a technology correspondent for MSNBC who wrote Your Evil Twin: Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic. Jackson had such a successful career as an identity thief that he is called “the father of identity theft.” Using prodigious social-engineering skills, Jackson was able to gather everything he wanted about hundreds of high-profile targets that included Hollywood stars and CEOs. His primary sources were call-center agents from banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, and other corporations. Consequently, both speakers highlighted the value of automated systems. Automation is not vulnerable to social engineering and voice biometrics can block criminals who are already armed with personal information.

In short, the Opus Research Voice Biometrics Conference did a nice job of revealing dots that need to be connected and showing how they can be connected to create successful solutions.