Siemens IT Solutions offers Excelsis's biometric speaker recognition solution

Every day, help desks are besieged by calls from desperate PC users from all over the world, 20 per cent of whom have forgotten their password. In the past, it took an administrator about 30 minutes to supply a new password; today, a computer with Siemens voice recognition can do the same job in three minutes. This is because callers are now able to reset their password themselves using the unique sound and modulation of their voice.

Siemens IT Solutions and Services, founded in 2007, recently started to deploy the solution, which lastingly improves productivity in all kinds of companies and institutions, in-house and is now offering it to non-Siemens customers as well.

The secret of the system is "biometric speaker recognition". To register, each PC user receives from the help desk an encrypted e-mail message containing, among other things, a PIN and a short text. The user calls a special number and reads out the PIN number or enters it via the phone's keys and reads the text aloud, allowing the system to pick out the characteristic features of the user's voice and store them as a personal user profile.

Users who forget their password can call the help desk, where an automated voice response system asks him to repeat a random sequence of numbers several times. The system compares the caller's voice with the voice characteristics stored in his profile and, if they match, the user gets a new password over the telephone with which he can log into Windows. The service is available around the clock.

The solution was developed by Siemens partner Excelsis and enhanced with software components for voice recognition and voice biometrics devised by Siemens Corporate Technology. Siemens IT Solutions and Services has been using biometric speaker recognition in Germany since December 2007, and results show that nine out of 10 employees of the IT service provider are very happy with the biometric procedure. Siemens is now offering the system to customers as well.

The market for biometric solutions is growing on average by 30 per cent annually and, according to estimates by International biometrics group, is expected to reach a volume of $5.7 billion by the year 2010. Voice recognition currently accounts for roughly five per cent of this market, and the figure is growing steadily.

"By resetting the password via voice recognition, the help desk can significantly lower its costs," enthuses Gerd Hribernig, who heads the Biometrics Center at Siemens IT Solutions and Services. "At the same time, the system ensures a high level of security, as the data is stored on a separate server that can only be accessed by a few authorized persons. And to make things even more secure, the information required to enable the biometric password is sent to the PC users in encrypted format."