Star Performers: VoiceVault Enables Developers to Build Mobile Authentication Apps
Voice biometrics veteran VoiceVault made noise in March with its launch of ViGo, the first voice biometric platform built to develop mobile applications.
VoiceVault said that for first-time enrollments, the ViGo platform has a 99.99 percent success rate in rejecting imposters, and is 97 percent accurate in accepting real users.
"Organizations want to use voice biometrics in their mobile apps to deliver secure convenience, and they want to be able to integrate it in the simplest and quickest way possible," said Nik Stanbridge, vice president of product marketing, in a statement. "ViGo is responding to this need by providing a standardized out-of-the-box solution that cuts time to market and [fulfills] organizational resource needs with a complete voice biometrics package."
With accelerated mobile device sales comes an inevitable uptick in security breaches, placing ViGo front and center of the mobile voice authentication market.
"The triple threat of bring-your-own-device as a dominant enterprise trend, an increasingly hostile threat environment, and the deluge of frightening revelations about privacy courtesy of the NSA, is forcing enterprises and consumers to invest real money in mobile device security," said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research, in a statement.
In an April 2014 report, analysts at CompaniesandMarkets.com projected that the voice recognition industry will reach $113.2 billion in 2017 after experiencing a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.2 percent. Much of that growth will be fueled by voice biometrics, says Mike King, the research firm's director. King says the most surprising news from the research was that the global mobile biometrics market is expected to have a CAGR of 156.9 percent from 2013 to 2018.
"Mobile phone devices are driving the growth in voice recognition, with banks and other financial institutions implementing voice-based authentication for mobile phone-based bank transactions, again increasing growth," King said in an email. "At the moment, growth is due to financial organizations seeing the use of voice recognition as a major competitive advantage."
For its part, VoiceVault is encouraging developers to combine ViGo's voice authentication technology with other biometric applications. In a recent blog post on ViGo's Web site, VoiceVault noted that Apple's release of iOS 8 for mobile devices later this year will feature an upgraded version of its fingerprint scanning app, TouchID. VoiceVault suggested that by combining ViGo's voice biometrics with TouchID, developers can provide a more secure two-form authentication solution.
Julia Webb, executive vice president of sales and marketing at VoiceVault, sees an increase of voice biometrics around smart devices and mobile applications. "Mobile users are dissatisfied with their authentication methods," she says. "Depending on which report you read, the numbers are [that] 80 to 90 percent of people...don't like the options that are currently available."
Additionally, by extending voice biometrics beyond boardrooms and back pockets, a mobile device can become a multimodal application for many different use cases, such as healthcare. "Because of HIPAA requirements, there needs to be authentication to have access to video and audio," Webb says. "There are [already] scenarios where you have physicians using Google Glass to send streaming audio and video for people to consult on cases."