New research found that the pitch and speed human voice would likely change over a period of several months and years, and therefore voice biometrics might not be considered as adequate evidence for authentication any more. Organizations need to consider multifactor authentication when using voice biometrics. The research team analyzed former-Present Obama’s speech from 2009 to 2017, and found his voice accuracy dropped by 23%. They also tracked 122 speakers in six languages and found the error rate of voice biometrics doubled from 4% to 8% in two years. This was because human used up to 100 muscles to speak and these muscle would change or age as we aged. This article is interesting that it demonstrates that voice biometrics is not reliable enough as I thought before. Therefore, organizations indeed need to consider multifactor authentication including password, fingerprinting, hand geometry, facial recognition, and iris and retinal scanning.
Link: http://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/voice-biometrics-prone-to-error-study-shows/d/d-id/1328211
Interesting article. I’m not really surprise that an individuals voiceprint changes over time. I can usually guess whether I’m talking to an older person or a younger person on the phone. Sometimes I’m fooled. Either way, I agree this isn’t a great form of biometric security. It might be helpful in identifying any individual, but I would not rely on this alone for authentication.
I was surprised that men’s voices change more than men and thought it was interesting that this change is due to muscle fatigue. Us men need to shut our mouths I guess!
Great post Mengqi! I’m going to conduct a research to find out how reliable is this claim. I currently use several devices from which I set voice recognition as one of the authentication methods. Also, I am using a banking service that allows account access via voice recognition. I recently enabled this feature, so I am anxious to verify how accurate is this claim. Thank you for the heads up.