
How does HSBC's voice activated banking service work? [video] - hugopascal
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35611584
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m0nty
What if I have a recording of the account-holder's voice? Could computers be
programmed to mimic voices after hearing a sample? What are the fallbacks -
presumably old-fashioned verifications which might be subject to social
engineering?

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neximo4
I suspect certain types of recording, i.e lossless wouldn't be able to be
distinguished.

But your typical mp3, voice recording wont make the cut. It's quite easy to
tell a recording apart from a spectrogram.

There are also ways around this the bank can employ, such as the use of
spontaneity, which a recording cannot account for, i.e ask the user to say
something random if there is a doubt.

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sjtgraham
Remember that telephone calls are sampled at 8khz. A lot of information will
automatically be lost before the signal reaches the other party.

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martinald
Agreed, this is the reason I don't really trust the claims here.

It's actually much worse if you are using a mobile phone, since the GSM codec
will add even more artefacts before being passed via PSTN to them.

Add that to serious background noise and you are giving people to fake way
more room than a crystal clear PCM WAV.

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Alesis_Novik
In my opinion, this is a great move towards making mobile banking more usable.
Compared to carrying around a hard token or having a 20 random character
password, biometrics offer good user experience without compromising the
security too much. There are plenty intelligent ways of performing liveliness
detection, the most obvious being a challenge-response scenario.

That being said, no individual biometric is good enough to provide a good and
consistent experience on it's own. Every one has situations and environments
it fails in (noisy room, dark environment, etc.). That's why I believe only a
combination of different modalities (facial, voice, etc.), can provide a
robust and consistent solution.

For full disclosure - I'm the CTO of AimBrain and we're hiring:
[https://aimbrain.com/joinus](https://aimbrain.com/joinus)

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tamana
What's wrong with storing a digital key on the same device you use to access
the bank? No hardware token needed.

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trtmrt
This is most idiotic thing I have ever seen, sorry for hars language. Only
thing I need is to record your voice in order to get access to you account.
Are people going nuts or what ?! Same as face recognition have you ever try
opening your friend Iphone with his picture? Try ...

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gravypod
I'm worried that they are being compared to a bank that has face recognition
software to access their accounts.

You can fill most face recognition software with circles and a line drawn on
paper.

