What is a Voiceprint?

Everyone's voice is as unique as a fingerprint. The shape of someone's vocal cavity, the pitch of their voice and their dialect, among other characteristics, combine to make a distinctive, identifying attribute. A voiceprint captures and stores the characteristics of a voice in the form of a spectrogram, an encrypted digital representation that is saved as a binary file (not playable).

Businesses have recognized the potential of voiceprints as identifiers for their customers, which has led to the creation of voice authentication technology. To enroll in this feature, customers typically call the business and repeat scripted phrases or a long narrative of their own. The system then creates a voiceprint and stores it in a database.

With their secure voiceprint on record, the customer’s identity can be authenticated via their voice whenever they contact customer service. The interactive voice response (IVR) system will facilitate the authentication by passing the caller's voice to the voice authentication system, which will try to match it to voiceprints in its database. If there is a voiceprint match, then the customer can either self-serve in the IVR or speak with an agent. If they choose the latter, the authentication information can get passed to the agent so that they can skip this step, saving time and enhancing the customer experience.