Visa Partners With VocentVisa Partners With Vocent

Visa International Inc. said Monday that it has entered into a strategic partnership with voiceprint-authentication vendor Vocent Solutions Inc. to decrease help-desk costs and increase the security and convenience of resetting passwords for employees who forget them.

The previous process of resetting VPN passwords was tedious, Visa VP Georganne Scally says. Employees had to call the help desk, respond to some questions to confirm their identities, then call into their voice mail to retrieve passwords. With the new system, which has been active for about a month and a half, an employee who has provided a voiceprint need only call in to an automated system, state his or her name, answer a query (such as providing a random digit to ensure that someone isn't using a recording of an employee's voice to gain unauthorized access to the network), and a new password will automatically be generated.

Scully says it takes very little time for employees to provide information required to create a voiceprint, and support for the system requires little in the way of infrastructure upgrades. The technology works just fine, she says, even if users have a cold or their voices are otherwise affected. "It's a digital representation of the geography of your voice. How your voice is different from mine is because of how our bodies are constructed," she says. "It's the same as a fingerprint, but more accurate."

Such implementations are not unique, though. What may be more exciting are Visa's plans to work with Vocent on deploying voiceprint-authentication technology for secure access and transactions by consumers. "Visa is interested in the idea of universal commerce, where you can perform commerce transactions anytime, anywhere, anyhow you'd like," Scally says, noting that Vocent has already helped Visa develop a prototype for mobile-commerce operations.

"On a mobile phone, if you're purchasing something and have to key in a password or other types of information, it's difficult," she says. "So we're looking at Vocent to help us develop voice authentication and speech-recognition patterns so that would make it easier and faster."