Aculab

Aculab is a leading telecommunications company based in Milton Keynes, UK, with a United States office in Boston, Massachusetts. Its products include cloud based services, as well as hardware and software – all sharing the same high levels of performance, reliability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Its experience and expertise allow Aculab to serve the needs of almost every telecoms market sector: from contact centers, public safety and healthcare, to financial services, cybersecurity and more. It has been providing innovative enabling technology to the global telecoms industry for over 40 years, with a customer base that includes over 1,000 customers, spanning more than 80 countries.

Aculab has a deep understanding of the ever-changing needs of the telecommunications industry, both technical and regulatory, and is certified to ISO27001 and ISO9001. Customer service, customer satisfaction, data security and data privacy are at the heart of its company policy.

With the recent escalation in identity theft, fraud, and social engineering attacks, businesses have an urgent and compelling need to provide additional safeguards to protect their and their customers’ data and services.

That’s where Aculab’s flagship authentication product, VoiSentry, comes in. It can identify an individual, or verify a claimed identity, given only a short audio sample of their voice. It allows developers to give their clients a frictionless and effective authentication process, optimizing the end-user experience (UX).

VoiSentry is simultaneously accurate, secure, robust, flexible, easy-to-deploy and cost-effective. It employs state-of-the-art Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Linguistics and Signal Processing technology to achieve reliable, real time authentication.

Developed by a multi-disciplinary team of specialists, VoiSentry has been optimized for use in the real world – not just the idealized environment of the test lab. Its language-independent technology provides robustness in deployments where multiple languages, dialects or accents are commonplace. This is increasingly important throughout North America and Europe.

Language independence even allows authentication of many people with voice or speech disorders, facilitating compliance with regulations such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, “Title IV”) in the USA, and The Equality Act 2010 in the UK.

The flexibility offered by VoiSentry allows Aculab’s OEM partners to add voice authentication to any voice-based solution (whether fixed line, mobile, VoIP, or app-based) and so provide increased security in a way that callers perceive as both natural and unobtrusive.

Key System Differentiators

• Easy Integration – new developers can use the VoiSentry API to produce simple ‘drop-in’ replacements for existing authorization processes with very little effort
• Powerful API – when designing a new transaction dialog from scratch, developers can fully utilize the flexibility of the VoiSentry API to include multifactor authentication and use different operating modes throughout the transaction to produce systems that are far more secure than anything based solely on passwords
• Versatile – available with multiple deployment options: VoiSentry can be run on on-premises hardware, in a hosted data center, or in the cloud
• Robust, Highly-scalable Architecture – automatic fail-over and a multinode load-sharing cluster-based architecture, gives assured business continuity and scalability
• Cost-effective – authentication with VoiSentry can reduce fraud, reduce transaction and agent time, and improve the UX, all while offering a rapid return on investment (RoI)

Key Technology Differentiators

• Language and Pathology Independent – can operate on almost any vocalization regardless of language, dialect, or accent, even in the presence of many voice and speech disorders
• Text-dependent and Text-independent Modes – operation can be ‘text dependent’ (e.g. using a pass-phrase or a prompted response) or ‘text independent’ (for passive monitoring during a transaction or conversation)
• 3-way Presentation Attack (Spoof) Detection (PAD) – VoiSentry’s PAD algorithms can flag up potential attempts to hack into the target system, and can even indicate the most likely form of any attack (replay, impersonation, or voice conversion / speech synthesis)
• Per-speaker Customization – each speaker can choose their own passphrase, and the speaker models can be updated or adjusted on a per-speaker basis, without any need for re-enrollment
• Security – audio can be encrypted to prevent ‘packet sniffing’ intercepts; no audio is stored within the VoiSentry system; voiceprints are not externally accessible
• Audio Compatibility – operates over a wide range of acoustic environments, and recording devices; accepts most common audio formats – anything from a standard ITU G.711 telephone codec upwards