Pay by Voice

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Some banks are now moving toward a two-channel authentication approach similar to Voice Pay's, in which both the Internet and another channel such as a phone line are used to authenticate account holders, says Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom. But while this added layer of security is to be welcomed, voice prints have yet to prove themselves.

"Experiments with many previous systems over the past 20 years have shown that voice prints just aren't good enough for unattended operational use in this kind of application," Anderson says. "Either you set the threshold so that everyone's accepted--fraudsters too--or you get too many false negatives."

Voice Pay claims to be different. Unlike older approaches to voice verification, which analyze the waveforms of a person's voice by breaking it up into its constituent fundamental frequencies, Voice Pay's system uses vocal samples to create a model of the person's throat. Dutch bank ABN-AMRO is currently installing the same underlying technology for its four million customers, says Harris.

Voice Pay won't reveal the false-acceptance and false-rejection rates for its system, however. It argues that consumer confidence will come from the fact that Voice Pay will guarantee all payments.

"You will always get false matches," says Harris. But the accuracy of the engine at this stage makes them so improbable that the system is more secure than existing payment systems, he says.

In fact, fraud should be dramatically reduced, says Ogden, because there's no need to dish out credit-card details during a transaction.

Since the system was quietly launched a month ago, more than 120,000 users have registered for accounts, says Ogden. But they won't be able to use their accounts until retailers come onboard and start including the Voice Pay icon within their shopping baskets.