With Nuance’s announcement of Dragon ID, a technology that combines voice dictation with voice biometric, it looks like “the penny has finally dropped” for the speech recognition giant. As foreshadowed in the ArmorVox voice biometric product launch earlier this year, combining voice recognition with voice biometrics makes a very powerful security solution, certainly for consumer devices.

But what about the security of services that these devices are connected to: “the Cloud”? While voice on the device may be convenient to secure the device, it is a dangerous to rely on this to secure the Cloud. Will banks, governments, and telcos allow access to their secure services using on-device authentication? Very unlikely! Apart from the problems of verifying whose voice it is in the first place, there is also the problem of device level false accept reliability and spoofing. It would be simple to use pre-recorded samples to spoof the device. And, like Siri, it will not take long for hackers to find a “work around”, especially where there are peoples’ bank accounts to be had.

So it’s “thumbs up” to Nuance for finally realizing that biometrics plus recognition makes for a powerful combination. No doubt there’ll be much interest in the consumer market. But for serious voice biometric security you need a technology built for the job – ArmorVox…