Guided by voices: T-Netix, Peak link on Internet security

T-Netix and Peak Network Communications announced last week that they have formed a joint venture to pursue Internet security solutions based on voice recognition technology.

The new entity, Sentry Systems, will develop products based on T-Netix's SpeakEZ Voice Print and VeriNet WEB technologies and Peak's Web server security software. The driver behind the formation of Sentry is to add a layer of security more specific than things such as firewalls or passwords, said Pat Flannery, vice president of marketing at T-Netix.

"If you look at all of the different network security components that exist today, all of them do some survey as to who the user is," Flannery said. "What they don't address is who the individual is who wants to make the transaction. They don't go to the weakest link."

The first product Sentry will develop, which will link users to a remote voice authentication server via their desktop PC microphones, will be designed for electronic commerce transactions over enterprise and Internet service provider networks, said Mark Willoughby, vice president of marketing for the joint venture.

"Peak brings Internet marketing savvy and electronic commerce awareness," he said.

The technology developed by T-Netix extracts features from a user's voice and compares the voice print with a historical one. In the Internet security application, that extraction will be done at the client level and sent over the Internet as an encrypted data packet to avoid transmission noise and other degradations, Flannery said.

"You won't have the challenges of the public switched network," he said. "We'll be looking at a pure data signal in a packetized form."

T-Netix's history of developing security applications for prison phone networks in conjunction with carriers should help open distribution channels to ISPs, Flannery said.

"That gives us a lot of expertise in network-based transactions and a good contact base with carriers," he said.