Voice recognition technology can change the service experience for money transfer, banking and commerce. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH
Voice, the darling of mobile network operators, has been under siege for years now with the growth of over the top (OTT) service providers.
As a channel of communication it has not seen much by way of innovation and its use has been pigeon-holed by the peer to peer use case.
A key characteristic of human voice is that it carries a unique signature. Every human being has a differential in intonation, accent, pronunciation and other voice qualities that make it an ideal candidate for use in identification.
With growth in the fintech space driven by the opportunity that financial inclusion and service innovation presents, it is curious that we have not seen adoption of voice biometrics in service differentiation.
Currently, leading financial technology (fintech) services in the microcredit and transaction processing space require access to a personal terminal such as a phone or card.
Google recently opened up its Cloud Speech API to third party developers covering over 80 languages, coming head to head with companies such as Nuance which has close ties to IBM and has been at the core of many popular services that leverage voice for OEM’s and car manufacturers.
My imagined application of this technology goes beyond transcription and processing. Mashed up with fingerprinting technology that powers services such as Shazam and Sound Hound, voice recognition API’s can change the service experience for money transfer, banking and commerce as we know it.
The simplified step by step play would look like this. First the mobile consumer would be asked to opt in and sign up for the new voice based identity as a service offering that promises flexibility and added security while performing critical financial transactions.
Part of the onboarding process will be a simple sampling of the user’s voice, reading out a phrase or set of numbers in a language of their choosing.
Second, day to day conversations would be randomly sampled at lengths of no more than five seconds each to continuously build out a highly fine-tuned signature that is encrypted in storage.
Thirdly, the check out or fulfilment process can take three forms; where there is a stored PIN, where a one-time transaction code is presented and where a random phrase is given, personalised based on language preferences that were captured when onboarding.
With the dynamics of authentication and verification streamlined and unshackled from personal terminals and devices we can now start to reimagine financial services that are truly universally accessible.
Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic. www.mbuguanjihia.com. @mbuguanjihia
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