Voice recognition technology smart; but has vulnerabilities India is second, only to US in rapid adoption

By Yashaswini Sri

Did You Know?

because it’s easier and more convenient than fingerprint and face recognition. For years, I have used voice assistants so you get used to voice recognition as a password.”

Voice

recognition technology has been adopted as an alternative to fingerprint and iris scanning, despite privacy concerns of the users and vulnerability to attacks.

According to a Statista report, the voice recognition market is forecast to grow from $10.7 billion in 2020 to $27.16 billion by 2026 beacuse of the demand.

Trinity Audio reports that India is the second fastest countryto adopt voice-activated technology, just behind the US. More than three-quarters (76per cent) of Google users are familiar with speech and voice recognition technology and have been using it their daily activities.

Pintu Kumar, a professor who teaches Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the GITAM University, Bengaluru, said: “Biometrics is part of our daily lives. Our identity is intertwined with our biometrics. Out of all biometrics, voice recognition is the most vulnerable because we have many AIs that can be used to impersonate any person. In a country like India, identity theft is way easier than most of the people think.”

He further said: “Yes, we have many kinds of biometrics and are free to choose any of them. As technology tightenssecurity, the same kind of technology is used to break security as well.”

Syncsense, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to help businesses dub videos, responded to The Observeron email: “AI has both advantages and disadvantages. Artificial intelligence is a great help when it comes to creating content, especially audio. We can play around, add emotion and duplicate the voice in many different ways. That makes the usage of AI both helpful and harmful as well. Hackers and fraudsters can prey on people and steal data. Voice recognition as a biometrics is still vulnerable to use.”

Samminga Raja, a student who uses voice recognition technology for biometrics, said: “Personally I am comfortable with voice recognition as a biometric

While voice and speech recognition is popular in India, many users are unaware it can be used as biometrics. Sharudh D, who completed his computer science engineering course, said: “I never knew voice recognition has the potential to be used as a biometric. I am only aware of, and have used,fingerprint.”

A University of Alabama research paper said voice biometrics is based on the assumption that each person has a unique voice that depends not only on the physiological features of his/ her vocal cords but also on his/ her body shape, and on the way sound is formed and articulated.

Nitesh Saxena, PhD, director of the Security and Privacy In Emerging Computing and Networking Systems, said, “Once the attacker defeats voice biometrics using fake voices, he could gain unfettered access to the system, which may be a device or a service, employing the authentication functionality. Because people rely on the use of their voices all the time, it becomes a comfortable practice What they may not realize is that level of comfort lends itself to making the voice a vulnerable commodity. or leave voice samples online which is not good.” yashaswini.s@iijnm.org