Consumer Voice Authentication: the Australian Tax Office's example

Anonymous Coward

in security on 2014-09-12 13:28 (#2SAQ)

How do you feel about the government maintaining a database of voice samples of everyone? If you're not against the practice, then Australia might be the place for you.

A new voice recognition system in use by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) to identify customers. The system asks taxpayers to repeat a phrase in order to compare it to a voiceprint by which they can 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.

On the one side, that's interesting tech, was probably a fun database project for some team, and saves money. What's not to like? On the other hand, you can bet that the NSA and similar agencies are also employing some version of this technology. So, who would like to step up to the microphone?

[Author note: 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.]

6 comments

Charming (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-12 14:06 (#2SAW)

I find it charming that even after the leaks of the last two years we still think it's even possible the US has NOT already done all this and more. Faces, voices, bodies, associates, habits, locations, etc., etc.

It's almost a trivial exercise with all the DMV license photos and telco / ISP taps, and social security and new ACA health databases too.

If I have a (twin) brother (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-12 14:09 (#2SAX)

will the system be able to distinguish between his voice and mine? I have a hard time distinguishing between my sisters' voices on the phone, and my voice printing system has several orders of magnitude more R&D than this project (so far).

Will "I had a cold and couldn't authenticate" become a popular excuse for missing deadlines with the ATO?

Re: If I have a (twin) brother (Score: 1)

by hyper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-12 14:57 (#2SB5)

Looks like an additional system for which if it fails the customer identification would fall back to the existing talk-to-a-human-who-can-see-your-records method

Re: If I have a (twin) brother (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-12 15:07 (#2SB7)

Right, similar to callerID routing you based on your home phone number.

Doing some digging (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-12 22:14 (#2SC1)

Some other articles have stated the system needs a claimed ID or the caller's phone number to help narrow the list of records, then does verification of the voice against the "voiceprint" on record. I don't think comparing the caller's voice over thousands of records is particularly efficient for this application (NSA may be a different story)

Re: Doing some digging (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-13 09:29 (#2SC7)

Which is how identification systems work. Register within the system something the user has, knows or is, then match that information to identify them.

What happens in the future when they have enough people on record to identify them in other areas? Compare voice prints against recorded phone calls to match exactly who is speaking perhaps?