Now pay your credit card bills the secure way with your voiceprint

Washington -- A British company claims to have developed a technology that uses a person‘s voiceprint as a way to secure credit card payments.

Each person has a unique voiceprint, and the company believes the same, rather than the credit card number, can be used while shopping and making payments.

Its inventors say the technology could help reduce identity theft and allow account holders to shop by mobile phone, even when they‘re nowhere near an Internet connection.

"It‘s a way of making payments for anything, anywhere with complete security and no concern. As long as they have a telephone they can do a transaction with Voice Pay," said Nick Ogden, founder and CEO of Voice Pay.

At the heart of Voice Pay is a speech authentication algorithm developed by Dublin-based Voice Vault.

Ogden said though on the surface, the system might seem a little like those voice dialling systems that exist on mobile phones, but it is much more sophisticated.

It analyzes 117 voice parameters that are wholly unique to an individual‘s vocal chords and the shape of the inside of the mouth and nasal cavity. Even a voice impersonator, who might sound like the user, cannot mimic certain subtleties naturally present in a person‘s voice, he said.

To use the voice payment system, a user has to first set up an account with Voice Pay, which can be done by calling the company from a cell phone and choosing a username and password, besides providing details of the credit card.

Next, the shopper provides a voiceprint by repeating a series of randomly generated numbers. Authenti

cation would take place at the time of purchase.

A website having a Voice Pay icon will launch the site, which once the shopper had logged in, would call the customer‘s cell phone. A computerized attendant would then ask the shopper to repeat numbers and then compare the person‘s speech to the voiceprint saved. If it matches, the credit card will be billed. But if it doesn‘t match, no purchase will be registered.

According to Ogden, a person could also potentially buy items over the phone, without the Internet.

Retail items in a store or in a catalog would have a Voice Pay product number as well as a phone number listed that the customer could call. The shopper would enter the product number and go through the process of repeating numbers randomly generated by the computerized attendant.

However, Andreas Stolcke, a senior research engineer at SRI in Menlo Park, CA, who specializes in speech and speaker recognition, said the way sound is produced in a person‘s vocal chords, and then manipulated by the mouth and tongue, is difficult to model.

Other variables including the recording channel and background noise add to the difficulty of analyzing the sound and then matching it later. "I would not rely on it exclusively," he said.

"It‘s a little like predicting the weather. You can measure the state of the weather at a particular instant and create a model of how it develops from one day to the next, but it‘s an imprecise model, and you can‘t always predict what will happen the next day," Discovery News quoted him as saying.

But Ogden is not as skeptical. Voice Pay‘s website launched on April 30, 2007 and to date has more than 200,000 people signed up to the use the system once it‘s adopted by banks. Ogden further said he‘s already in discussion with 52 banks around the world. (ANI)