What’s next.

As part of our “Client insights and intel” webinar series, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Mark DiMarzio, VP Risk of Fidelity Investments, during a virtual fireside chat.  Mark spoke about business practices to address increases in fraud volume, thinking through fraud verification and alert processes, and how to help his team understand patterns […]

As one of Australia’s “big four” financial institutions, National Australia Bank (NAB) serves more than 6 million customers across the country with around 2,000 frontline bankers handling more 8 million inbound calls every year. That’s a lot of phone interactions, making it difficult to deliver exceptional customer service, especially when time-consuming – and sometimes confusing […]

I’m thrilled to share that the Security & Biometrics team at Nuance, in the context of the pandemic, rapidly innovated and delivered novel AI technology to Telefónica, enabling seniors to receive prioritized customer service. How did we do it? Prior to the pandemic, we had the ability to differentiate adults from children by analyzing their […]

The spread of coronavirus has resulted in increased uncertainty for many. Feelings of ambiguity have triggered a variation of consumer behavior. Many are calling their banks to check on payments and seek reassurance. Some are diving into their work to stay productive and keep the feeling of progression going. Others are ‘switching off’ from the […]

Fraudsters don’t stop their crimes because of a pandemic. They often seize the immense change that comes with an event like this to ramp up activity. With the recent shift to a stay-at-home world, there is a significant increase in fraudster attacks against call centers – testing for vulnerabilities by directly attacking work-at-home agents, or […]

Improving the customer experience is all about removing friction from every interaction. The easier it is to interact with your brand, the more likely your customers are to stay long-term. But what could be more frictionful (if that’s a word) than calling an IVR and having to answer a multitude of security questions? Not only […]

Zero-effort authentication in customer engagement means creating a balancing act between security and convenience. That’s why voice biometrics has become the golden goose for companies looking at authentication solutions providers. Competitive enterprises are discovering how voice biometrics ensures a more secure engagement than passwords provide within voice channels, and certainly a more convenient experience for […]

World Password Day is a great opportunity to evaluate the role of PINs and passwords today and consider their limitations when it comes to safeguarding financial and personal information in today’s digital society – never mind causing consumers serious headaches. Nuance recently commissioned a survey asking 5,000 citizens, aged 18+ across the US, UK, Germany, […]

A recent Finnish university study on voice biometrics has been making headlines – and most of those news stories have been inaccurately summarizing the results with concerns as in our title above, leading many to believe that cyber crooks can compromise even the best speech recognition systems. Before commenting on the article and the study, […]

One of the anxieties that I’ve often heard expressed regarding voice biometrics is how does the technology account for the natural aging of our voice? Through our personal experience, we all know that the voice we had as a child is quite different from the voice we now have as an adult. Fortunately, as I’ll […]

Recently, there has been a rising tide of concerns surrounding voice manipulation software. In sum, this technology allows a person to take someone’s speech recordings and create new utterances that the individual may or may not have said. This type of synthetic speech technology has been around for decades, but the entry of a new […]