American Banker

Consumers Still Wary of Voice Recognition

September 11, 2003
By Chris Costanzo

Banks have never made much use of voice-recognition technology to confirm identities, but some people in the industry still say it has potential.

Boosters say freeing customers from having to remember a personal identification number or password could be a boon to call centers. Doubters emphasize the technology's failure rate and consumer concerns about security.

A recent study found that consumers see the security value of voice authentication but are not ready for it to replace other methods, said Jack J. Carroll, a partner at TouchPoint Consulting. The Boston firm, which researches and designs automated channels, released the study last month with the Financial Services Technology Consortium.

Mr. Carroll suggested that financial institutions use voice authentication along with information that is easily remembered, such as the mother's maiden name, to eliminate PINs.

The study was based on four focus groups of 10 people each, a telephone survey of 600 people, and a one-on-one demonstration of the technology to 28 people.

Jim Salters, the director of technology initiatives and project development at the Financial Services Technology Consortium, said consumers tended to confuse voice recognition, the computer identification of individual voices, with speech recognition, the computer interpretation of spoken words.

As with many customer-facing applications, consumer acceptance can hinge on seemingly quirky factors, the study found. For example, consumers considered the system more secure if they were asked to say a random word rather than their name, Mr. Salters said.

Mr. Carroll said consumers' fears receded once they learned more about the technology. "We had very long discussions about security," he said. Consumers "immediately grasped the convenience versus having to remember PINs."

The few banks using voice recognition use it only to identify employees, not customers.

"We don't want to put our customers through an unpleasant experience," said Virginia Johnston, the executive vice president of customer care at NetBank Inc. The Internet-based company welcomes advances in remote technology, she said, but voice recognition does not yet work consistently. "We're waiting for when there's more intelligence behind it."

Trevor W. Prout, the director of marketing at International Biometric Group, a New York research firm, said voice authentication still holds promise as a way to cut costs and add security.

Under ideal conditions, he said, it can work as well as more mainstream biometric technologies, such as fingerprint recognition. But voice ID systems are susceptible to background noise and the differences between land-line and cell-phone transmission, he said.

Furthermore, Mr. Prout noted, voices are variable. "Your fingerprint is not going to change if you just woke up or you had a few drinks."

Even so, Mr. Salters contends that voice authentication has attractions. It could reduce or eliminate the need to reset passwords when people forget them and to quiz customers about personal information when they phone a call center.

"That's a compelling enough proposition today for some institutions that also have an eye on customer-facing applications," Mr. Salters said.