Published on the 01/10/2014 | Written by Beverley Head
Locally developed voice biometrics technology, already used by New Zealand’s IRD for taxpayer identification, has been picked up by Shadowtrack for US and Canada house arrest applications…
Auraya System’s ArmorVox10 has displaced Nuance as the voice biometrics platform being used to develop house arrest electronic monitoring systems by Shadowtrack in the US and Canada. Offenders upload a voice print to the system which can then automatically dial them, ask them to speak or repeat a few words, and identify them. The deal follows swiftly on the heels of the Australia based Auraya securing US patent protection for its speaker adaptive voice biometric technology which automatically optimises the performance of the system to the language, accent and telecommunications environment being used. Unlike speech recognition systems which can be limited in application, ArmorVox is a voice biometrics platform designed to identify the speaker regardless of what they are saying. According to Robert Magaletta, Shadowtrack president and CEO, “These features are critical to expanding the application for Shadowtrack into several other solutions including the offender self-reporting, prison telephone monitoring and the immigration/asylum seeker markets worldwide.” Dr Clive Summerfield, Auraya founder and CEO, said that at present Shadowtrack was using the ArmorVox system to, “confirm it’s the villain on the phone and not their best mate”. But he said that the product was now being broadened to analyse prisoner telephone calls, “to ensure they are speaking to their mother or girlfriend and not some ringleader on the outside”. Auraya was established as an offshoot of Summerfield’s biometrics consulting business in 2006, with the ArmorVox product released in 2012. The company works with international partners – 50 to date according to Summerfield – to deploy the systems, notably in Australia and New Zealand working with Salmat on deployments at St George Bank and with the NZ IRD. Summerfield said that 95 percent of the potential market for the system was offshore which necessitated the international partner model. Besides the NZ IRD which has deployed the technology to authenticate callers, Auraya’s system is being used to create advanced password reset applications allowing voice to be used to authenticate user identity, reducing the chance of identity fraud. Dr Summerfield said that the company was about to turn its first profit, as a series of pilot projects went live into full blown programmes.
