Aspioneer (A): Primarily, what market do you focus on? Tell us a bit about your technological partners and your customers?
(R): “Auraya’s target markets are organizations of all sizes in the financial services, government, health services, retail services, and telecom markets. To serve these markets, Auraya works with technology partner organizations that deploy, customize and support ArmorVox and EVA into the client’s ecosystem. Some of Auraya’s global partner organizations are Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, Connect Managed Services, and ECS, Convai, Unisys, and Fujitsu. Some of Auraya’s notable customers are KPMG, State Street Bank, Government of Canada, Vodafone, Telstra, OFX, Acquire BPO, NSW Health, New Zealand Government, and Bank of New Zealand. Auraya has many highly valued partnerships as well. For example, Auraya has a special relationship with Amazon Connect as a voice biometric ISV (independent software vendor). Amazon Connect customers can simply activate EVA from the Amazon Marketplace and start consuming a powerful voice biometric capability with consumption fees simply added to their monthly AWS service fee. Similarly, Auraya’s long-term membership of the Genesys Appfoundry enables Genesys customers to add voice biometric capability to their customer communication channels. The recent addition of EVA Web capability to Auth0, PingFederate, and Okta enables any organization using these industry-leading identity and access management systems to simply turn on and start using EVA Web as an authenticating ‘factor’ in their multi-factor authentication process.”
Aspioneer (A): How does Auraya innovate?
(R): “The team at Auraya are highly motivated specialists driven by a desire to be the best in the world in our chosen specialty. The open collaboration within the team is underpinned by a high degree of trust and respect for each other and a commitment to the shared vision. The team works collaboratively to build a unique artificial intelligence that allows a human voice to be a powerful, secure, convenient key to accessing services and identifying voice traits. Celebrating and rewarding success at a team and individual level is an important ingredient in building and sustaining the team, however, real progress in creativity is also achieved by recognizing and rewarding the new learning that occurs when an innovative idea is tried and found not to work as hoped. Success comes from bold creative attempts of innovation, not incrementalism. High levels of trust and respect enable bold ideas to be experimented with and occasional dramatic breakthroughs that enable true category leadership to be created and maintained.”
Aspioneer (A): How well is the company positioned for growth? How secure is voice biometric identity verification as compared to other biometric authentication methods?
(R): “The voice biometric market has been on the edge of huge growth for three decades. The leadership team at Auraya have stood on the precipice of this opportunity learning, growing, and delivering valuable outcomes to organizations and their customers who have adopted voice biometric solutions which has led to improved ability for consumers to get access conveniently yet securely to services without needing to remember and recite pins, passwords, or answers to secret questions. While the evolution of other forms of biometrics such as fingerprint and face recognition on smartphones has propelled the advantages of voice biometrics to the forefront and now, we are more excited than ever at the opportunity that exists to deliver world-leading voice intelligence to make security, convenience, and efficiency in traditional and emerging customer service channels. In time, Auraya’s AI will not only reveal a person’s identity but provide information about their mood, their age, their language of origin, their preferences about products and services, and even insights into their health.
Voice biometrics will be a key factor and form part of the arsenal to mitigate threats from bad actors. Finger, face, one-time passcodes, knowledge-based passwords are all stored on the device that you use. To achieve a real multi-factor “out of band” security, voice can be captured conveniently using the device microphone and securely posted to a secure vault to ensure that the correct device is being used to display the correct one-time passcode which is spoken by the authorized individual. This true MFA process which is not just a device-based process will enable secure yet convenient transaction or access verification. This explains why voice biometrics is moving from a contact center-centric technology to a trusted factor that improves security and privacy in all channels. For example, we are all a bit frustrated with the requirement to get a one-time passcode from our phone or email to enable a transaction on a website. Voice biometrics is now being used where a user is simply asked to touch a microphone icon on the screen and say the digits that are displayed. This stops us from fumbling around for different apps or devices and we can easily confirm that the authorized person is verifying the transaction. Our EVA web solution offers this capability as it is already integrated into the leading identity access management platforms like Okta, PingFederate, Auth0, and others.”
Aspioneer (A): What impact has the pandemic had on Auraya, and what does the future hold?
(R): “The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people work and interact with organizations, both as employees and consumers. We have adapted along with others and are working remotely and interacting in a manner where face-to-face transactions are declining. We are also seeing an increase in fraud such as ransomware and account takeover and other cyber threats. Governments are also increasing the level of privacy protection regulations to address an increased desire for more consumer privacy. Not all this is caused by COVID-19 but it has accelerated some of these trends. These trends are driving more adoption of voice biometric technology that protects the identity and makes digital identity easier to secure. Going ahead, our plan is to further develop and expand the global reach of our technology suite that underpins voice biometric solutions to improve security and user convenience and organizational efficiency.”