Uniphore Software Systems, a speech-based mobility solutions provider to businesses, has partnered with the speech recognition company Nuance Communications to offer Speech Recognition and Voice Biometric Solutions to banking institutions across India. The company said that it has used Nuance's VocalPassword solution and Nuance Recognizer engine to develop a mobile voice banking app which allows banks to authenticate their customers by using their voice as their passwords and enable them to make banking and commercial transactions through a speech-based navigation system. While VocalPassword will verify the user's identity based on the customer's interaction with the app and the voice samples acquired during these interactions, the Recognizer engine will provide speech-based navigation to the users for making transactions. Uniphore stated that this service will offer local language options with support for 14 languages including Indian English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese and Bhojpuri, and Urdu and users can use any mobile phone including low-cost feature phones to make these transactions. Further, all transactions will happen in real time and the service will also deliver account updates to customers using Nuance text-to-speech and outbound text message technologies. Uniphore noted that this service will ensure compliance with banking regulations across the country, and it plans to allow institutions extend their services to different segment of people across the country without investing in infrastructure or hardware. Going forward, it also plans to extend the service to other verticals such as mHealth and mCommerce. Other Nuance Developments In July 2011, MapMyIndia had signed a seven year strategic partnership with Nuance to offer street level turn-by-turn voice navigation on its…
