A Commercial Implementation of a Free-Speech Speaker Verification System in a Call Center

Abstract

This document describes the implementation of a free speech speaker verification solution in the Israel First Direct Bank's (FDI) call center. This implementation is, as far as we know, the world's first commercial free-speech SV implementation.

Before implementing the system, FDI was using a manual speaker authentication method consisting of several personal questions that the calling customer had to answer correctly (e.g. “What is the first letter of your mother's maiden name”). Most call centers still use similar methods for authenticating callers. The FDI realized that this process was expensive and time-consuming and that it was also vulnerable to impostors since the answers for the authentication questions could be obtained quite easily.

In this document we describe how free speech SV was implemented and integrated with the FDI systems in order to reduce the cost of customer authentication and to increase security. We discuss the type of expectations the FDI had from this system and how expectations should be adjusted to realistic levels. We also describe some of the major obstacles that were encountered when implementing the system in a real world environment and finally we present the current performance level of the system in terms of false acceptance and false rejection of callers.