What Does Voice Authentication Mean?
Voice authentication is a type of security authentication that relies on a person’s unique voice patterns for identification in order to gain access. This type of authentication requires a device that can capture a person’s voice very accurately and software that can recognize the patterns of the voice and compare it to already-recognized patterns.
Voice authentication is also known as voice biometrics, voice ID or speaker recognition.
Techopedia Explains Voice Authentication
Voice authentication should not be confused with speech recognition, which is about recognizing what is said rather than who is saying it. Voice authentication relies on a person’s unique voice biometric, which is the digital or numerical representation of the sound, rhythm and pattern of a person’s voice, which is as unique as his/her fingerprints or iris patterns.
A person’s voice is extremely difficult to forge in terms of biometric comparison purposes because of its inherent uniqueness, which is also due to the myriad of unique measured qualities of the voice such as dialect, speaking style, pitch, format frequencies and spectral magnitudes. What this means is that, even if a voice impersonation sounds very similar to the human ear, detailed analysis of the voice print done by a computer shows vast differences from the sample. Even a professionally recorded voice has many differences from a directly spoken sample due to additional distortions created by the microphone and speaker. Therefore, assuming the quality of the biometric software is good, it would not register voice recordings, even those of people who would otherwise be authorized to access the system.
