Using voice biometrics for authentication
Voice biometrics take the aggravation out of authentication and help organizations verify the actual person behind the interaction based on the sound of their voice.
How does voice biometric authentication work?
Authentication is often the worst part of the customer experience. Do you remember your 13-digit account number? That password you created a year ago? Your childhood pet’s nickname? Traditional security factors like these are frustrating, unreliable, and vulnerable to fraud. Voice biometrics verify the actual person behind the interaction, rather than something they know or something they have.
Nuance Gatekeeper, our cloud‑native biometric security solution, makes it easy for organizations of any size to streamline authentication and prevent fraud. A person just speaks naturally, and Gatekeeper analyzes their voice to determine if it’s the real customer or a fraudster in a matter of seconds. This can be used in the call center with live agents, in your IVR, or in web, mobile, and messaging channels.

What is a voiceprint?
A voiceprint is not a recording. It’s an intricate, mathematical representation of the anatomical and acoustic factors that make each person’s voice one‑of‑a‑kind.
Nuance uses a type of AI called a deep neural network to analyze each customer’s voice against millions of parameters and create a single sophisticated and encrypted model—their voiceprint.
How secure is a voiceprint?
Account credentials can be stolen and purchased on the dark web, phone numbers can be spoofed, and SMS texts can be intercepted. But no one else sounds like you. There are millions of factors that make your voice unique, which means it’s one of the best ways to verify your identity and shut down fraudsters as soon as they speak.
But what if a fraudster recreates or “deepfakes” a customer’s voice? The growth of widely accessible tools for generating synthetic speech has caused concerns around voice deepfakes and voice playback attacks. Even in these cases, Nuance Gatekeeper can detect small, telltale artifacts left on the audio signal and will distinguish between the live human voice and the counterfeit. Our speech scientists are constantly improving our voice algorithms to combat these modern threats.
Benefits of voice biometrics
Improve experiences
Streamlined biometric authentication helps improve customer satisfaction by as much as 85%, and helps your agents deliver faster, more personalized service.
Prevent fraud
Uncover more fraudsters and fraud attacks, enabling your team to handle 3x more cases daily, with a 90% reduction in manual reviews.
Reduce costs
Authenticate customers in as little as 0.5 seconds, bringing massive reductions to AHT and operational costs. Prevent damaging fraud losses before they happen.
Resources
Data sheets
-
Nuance Gatekeeper(pdf. Open a new window)
Discover integrated biometric authentication and intelligent fraud detection for every channel. -
Exceptional fraud prevention, exceptional outcomes(pdf. Open a new window)
See how Nuance Gatekeeper’s industry‑leading biometric authentication and fraud prevention outshines competitors.
Case studies
-
Telefónica uses voice biometrics to personalize CX for seniors
Discover how Telefónica is giving their seniors priority service using only their voice, with Nuance voice biometrics as part of Nuance Gatekeeper.
Analyst report
-
Opus Research 2022 Intelligent Authentication and Fraud Prevention Intelliview
Learn why Nuance was named the market leader in biometrics technology by Opus Research in its annual assessment of the market landscape.
Blogs
-
The future of customer engagement is bright with Microsoft and Nuance(Open a new window)
Explore why Nuance and Microsoft have never been more confident in our ability to continue offering organizations unprecedented AI‑powered customer engagement solutions.