Australian Tax Office Uses Voice for Authentication

A new voice recognition system in use by the ATO to identify customers. The system asks taxpayers to repeat a phrase to a voice print prove their identity. The system is expected to save up to 45 seconds per phone call. The ATO receives about 8 million calls each year, 6 million of which require identification checks, for a total of about 3125 days, or 75,000 hours, each year spent performing identity checking.

You can bet that the NSA and other agencies also has this technology. On the flip side, it could be useful for people to record telemarketers so we can build a database of the people who spam us with annoying phone calls.