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The team at Avaya is now beginning to transform talk into action as the promise of Biometric Voice Identification becomes a growing reality for contact centre’s in Australia.
Avaya work with various software providers to integrate the IT environment to support Biometric Identification solutions and is now beginning to see some local early adopters achieve success with this technology.
“Most of our customers don’t want to go on record to talk about this technology as it presents a real advantage in their business operations and giving them a competitive edge,” said Rod Maxwell, Solutions Director for Avaya.
“The technology provides greater security and speeds up caller identification processes. This is particularly helpful for organizations in finance, government and security.
So what is Biometric Identification? When the technology was just talk, the concept was often confused with speech recognition technology. But now, according to Mr Maxwell, in the last 12 months, centre’s in Australia have reached that light bulb moment of understanding and are now really seeing where these two technologies differ and the benefits of each.
“These technologies are very different. Speech recognition technology is about understanding what someone is saying, in effect normalizing and generalizing different speech patterns so the meaning of the communication can be integrated back into the call flow. With Biometric Voice Identification, it is an entirely different approach. It doesn’t matter what the person says, what language they are speaking; it doesn’t even matter if they are calling on a mobile with a cold, the technology is simply interested in the voice print and vocal characterizations of an individual,” said Mr Maxwell.
Biometric Identification software will analyze a persons’ voice print and build a numeric model of their voice, by calculating various vocal characteristics. A voice print is in fact more unique than a fingerprint.
And for those skeptics who ask the question: What if I mimic another person’s voice or what if I play a recording of someone speaking to get past this security? Well Rod Maxwell says that the technology actually helps overcome those potential fraudulent practices.
“Individuals are required to first submit their voice profile and answer various questions, which can change randomly with every call. Some of the more advanced solutions combine Biometrics Identification with Speech Recognition, so there is both a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the authenticity of the callers voice,” said Mr Maxwell.
Organisations in the United States have been quick to take up the technology and with the peak of the technology price point now past, Australian companies are beginning to make the investment.
“This technology is very compelling for many businesses. The advantages in security and efficiency are quite significant. At Avaya, we are committed to driving the best outcomes for our customers and delivering results for both our customers and theirs. We realize it is incumbent on us to talk about this with our customers and demonstrate how it can make a big difference in their call centre operations. It is a win-win for them and their customers,” said Mr Maxwell.
National News