What is Speaker Verification
Speaker verification, also known as speaker recognition, can be defined as process of authenticating ones claimed identity by comparing their voice and previously recorded or computed speech characteristics (voiceprint, which is as unique as finger print ). While speech recognition is widely used in IVR, speaker verification or recognition is different than speech recognition and is relatively recent addition to numerous usage of IVR systems.

Speaker verification is one of the recent and advanced IVR feature which is increasingly being used some IVR applications where personal identification is very important, for example, Banking, attendance registration etc.

How it can be used in IVR ?

As the name suggests, speaker verification is essentially used for authentication a IVR caller to manage his account. Since now, IVR systems have been authenticating its caller with ‘password’ or PIN ( Personal Identification Number) by pressing telephone keys or DTMF or even speech recognition.

Normally, while using speaker recognition for user authentication, IVR caller is asked to speak a random phrase which is compared with caller’s existing voice print. This is a quicker process for user authentication.

Advantages of Speaker Verification

The age-old IVR user authentication method of asking caller to enter a 4 digit ( or 5 digit) PIN is slow as well as it needs to changed periodically. But with usage of speaker recognition, authentication process is faster and IVR may ask a caller to speak any phrase randomly without user having to remember PIN or keep changing it periodically.

Another method of caller verification was using ANI (Automatic Number Identification) or Caller ID. But though detection of caller ID is fool proof, but this kind of user authentication may not be fool proof as anybody could dial from user’s phone number. But speaker recognition with voice print does not suffer from these drawbacks. Speaker recognition along with speech recognition may provide almost fool prof user authentication.

How it helps usability of IVR

With speaker recognition, customer details could be retrieved quickly from CRM ( Customer Resource Management) and many routine questions to a caller could be avoided. Caller would be happier not having to repeat his information each time he calls to the IVR.

Since it authenticates a caller much faster, it can provider any service quicker to the caller and usability of the IVR increases.

Many people may feel frustrated having to enter PIN or change it periodically for security reasons. But with speaker recognition, a caller just has to speak a given phrase and can authenticate herself. Many people. specially the one, who use call center or IVR rarely, may forget PIN. With speaker recognition, user does not need to remember any PIN or change the PIN periodically.

What is speech recognition or automatic speech recognition ?
Automatic speech recognition can be defined as a process by which spoken words are converted to text. Many people may confuse with voice recognition as speech recognition. Voice recognition is recognising the speaker of the voice, while automatic speech recognition recognise the words spoken. While speech recognition is mainly used for menu selection, voice recognition is used for checking authorised user.

How automatic speech recognition can be used in voice portal ?
Voice portal is a large IVR application which provides many value added services to the voice portal user. Normally, voice portals are operated by telecom operators to provide information of their services, activating deactivating services, utility services like matrimonial, job search, listening to music and download, jokes etc. Since voice portals have large information to be provided to a caller, it needs to give out a long list of options. But the DTMF digits or touch tones on a mobile phone or telephone instrument is limited. So automatic speech recognition is used as an alternative to touch tone or DTMF input for selecting a menu option in the voice portal or IVR.

Advantages of Automatic Speech Recognition over DTMF in Voice Portal:
1. Caller can choose a menu option quickly without having to listen to boring long list of menus. IVR can become truly interactive with its caller using same human voice.
2. Using an IVR was always a problem as one he has to remove it from his ear to look at the keypad and press a key. This can be again quite irritating for a voice portal user. Implementation of ASR completely remove this problem.
3. Change of menu or introduction of new options a menu, or shuffling of options in a menu becomes easier as menu options are the words most commonly used by everybody for a particular option. Using a touchtone or DTMF menu, any option was assigned to a DTMF key or a number. With ASR, it is assigned to the word itself.
4. Not many people are aware of # and * keys as they are hardly used in normal operation while IVR seems to use them for some options for very long menus. ASR does not face this kind of problem.

So, one may find it very useful in a developer point of view to use ASR in voice portal as it gives more flexibility for designing menu and presentation of data. But as user point of view it may not that user friendly as touch tone. This mainly due to lack of 100% accuracy in recognising the word spoken by the caller. Wrong detection of words by ASR may result in very awkward menu options and information fetching. One way of tackling this problem is to confirm a user of his chosen option in the menu with a YES or NO for every menu option. But it would be too irritating for a user! A voice portal is normally a premium service where irritating caller is the biggest crime one can commit!

Problems of Speech recognition
1. Accuracy of recognition
Accuracy of recognition can be thought as converting words spoken by a user accurately to ts corresponding text.
As per information available ( by Googling and visiting ASR engine provider websites), almost all ASR engine has high accuracy for detecting two words, YES and NO. Apart from them, other words like numbers, date of births etc. has lower accuracy in recognising. For example, accuracy of recognition of numbers 1,2,3 etc vary from 87 to 91% depending on ASR engine. Accuracy of recognising other natural English language is fare much worse! As per report, recognising departments in company is maximum 85%!
Though accuracy can be improved by training of ASR, but it is not practical at all and does not serve a voice portal.

2. Different accent
Using ASR in a big country where people speak different languages or same language with different accents,speech recognition accuracy is bound to fare worse.

3. Confirming YES/NO again and again is irritating
People may design IVR very intelligently to confirm for any doubtful word recognition by YES or NO, but it is still irritating for many people and it slows down the time for fetching an information. In a voice portal where caller pays by minute of usage, it may not work in the interest of voice portal users.

Still, automatic speech recognition (ASR) is used widely in voice portal now a days and here are the few services in voice portal where ASR may work well :-

1. Contests
2. Classifieds
3. City wise weather information

Speech recognition in IVRS has become more of a necessity after mobile phones have arrived. POTS ( Plain Old Telephone ) System have telephone instrument with proper keypad along with head-set. Procedure of calling is suitable for pressing DTMF based interaction with IVR System!

You normally lift the headset with left hand, dial pressing keys on telephone instrument using your right hand. So, when IVR is connected and you are listening to the voices by IVR System as well as pressing keys! While in a mobile phone, the tiny instrument itself is head-set, so when you are listening to IVR instructions, it is almost impossible to press keys without removing from your ear and looking at keys! The one solution is to use ear-phone or blue-tooth powered wireless headset!

Most probably, this has given prompted IVR developers as well as CTI vendors to come out with speech recognition for IVR Input. Though, speech recognition has evolved a lot, still speech recognition can not claim to perform 100%. This happens mainly because of pronunciation, accents of language from one region to another.

There are many speech recognition engines available. Nuance, Loquendo, Microsoft, Spinvox etc. are few companies which provide speech recognition engines on various technologies.

IVR with speech recognition capabilities are supposed to more advanced and suitable for mobile user, but it is actually very difficult to predict if the IVR application and speech engine will be able to recognise speech command properly. But IVR with Speech Recognition has been on the rise and every IVR Company now a days provide speech recognition. CTI vendors too support speech recognition in their hardware.

But still many people like me, will prefer to use DTMF for giving command to IVR as it sounds more technical. Most probably some people will take time get used to the idea of commanding some invisible machines by speaking!