What is a Voiceprint?
Everyone's voice is as unique as a fingerprint. The shape of someone's vocal cavity, the pitch of their voice and their dialect, among other characteristics, combine to make a distinctive, identifying attribute. A voiceprint captures and stores the characteristics of a voice in the form of a spectrogram, an encrypted digital representation that is saved as a binary file (not playable).
Businesses have recognized the potential of voiceprints as identifiers for their customers, which has led to the creation of voice authentication technology. To enroll in this feature, customers typically call the business and repeat a scripted phrases or a long narrative of their own. The system then creates a voiceprint and stores it in a database.
With their secure voiceprint on record, the customer’s identity can be authenticated via their voice whenever they contact customer service. The interactive voice response (IVR) system will facilitate the authentication by passing the voice to the voice authentication system, which will try to match it to voiceprints in the database. If there is a voiceprint match the customer can now either self-serve in the IVR or speak with an agent. If they choose the latter, the authentication information can get passed to agent so that they can skip this step, saving time and enhancing the customer experience.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its call (or contact) center operations.
NICE CXone Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is fully-integrated voice self-service that accelerates resolution, improves routing and cuts cost with automation. It leverages ASR to verbally gather caller information and determine optimal handling for improved customer experience.
NICE CXone Real-Time Authentication (RTA) is integrated voice authentication that leverages real-time capabilities and voice biometrics for streamlined authentication identity via live agent and/or self-service CXone IVR. RTA offers a faster and more secure method of end-customer authentication by seamlessly and automatically verifying the claimed identity of a caller.