ICICI Bank will deploy voice-recognition technology for biometric authentication, that will enable customers to call and transfer funds to registered beneficiaries or pay bills without having to enter card numbers or keying in PIN codes, reports the Times of India. The feature will apparently roll out in the coming weeks. The feature will work by picking up a voice sample from customers in ‘just 10 seconds’ when they call the bank, post which the bank’s servers will identify the users account details and match it with its database. According to the bank, in the future voice data will be analyzed to identify if callers are agitated, in a hurry or irritated, to avoid cross-sell pitches. The bank has tied up with Nuance Communications, which helped create Apple’s Siri, to provide it with voice recognition. The software will use around 100 parameters for matching sound samples, for which it will need at least 35 seconds of voice during any conversation. According to the company, the voiceprint is a hashed string of numbers and characters that represent how specific an individual's voice rates on a host of characteristics being measured, and hence can work without the caller being required to speak specific words in any particular language. Note that over the past couple of years, banks have been rolling out speech recognition technology to battle fraud internationally. Typically these technologies work using spectrograms to verify identities and can tell its the same person even if they are ill. Voices are pretty hard…
