A Proposal on Initial Remote User Enrollment for IVR-based Voice Authentication Systems

Abstract: In the last decade, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems gained popularity among customer care, phone banking and many other commercial services. It helps to reduce conversation and dialing overheads, guides customers and automates call forwardings. On the other hand, many sensitive phone and online services, including banking operations and e-government applications, require strict and accurate user/customer authentication schemes. Although not being preferred so far, with regards to the recent developments on the voice recognition techniques, IVR emerges as a brilliant solution for authentication, too. When using IVR for voice authentication, all potential users must be enrolled and voiceprints (records) must be collected prior to start of the service. However, for scenarios where users are located in geographically distant places, it is very hard, if not impossible, to gather all the users in enrollment offices. So, this initial enrollment process should better be done remotely. In this study, we come up with a systematic method that allows institutions to enroll their users and record their voiceprints remotely, without compromising reliability of further authentication.

Keywords: Voice authentication, voice recognition, IVR, remote user enrollment, e-voting.