British bank Barclays will soon be rolling out a voice recognition system, provided by Nuance Communications, which verifies customers based on their speech patterns, according to a report by The Telegraph.
Using Nuance’s FreeSpeech voice biometrics solution, the system is already being offered to customers in its Wealth division. Starting in early 2015, the voice biometrics system will be extended to its other 12 million retail customers.
The system works by securely storing a recording of a customer’s voiceprint. After this initial recording, the customer will be able to talk to a customer service agent, during which time their voice is verified against these stored voiceprints.
The new voice biometrics solution significantly cuts down on the time it takes customers to verify their identity.
The system takes less than 10 seconds to verify the customer’s identity as compared to its previous 90 seconds, Barclays personal and corporate banking CEO Ashok Vaswani told The Sunday Telegraph.
Previously reported by BiometricUpdate.com, Nuance Communications is providing its audio virtual assistants combined with voice biometrics to USAA while US Bank is currently testing its voice assistant for some of its credit card customers.