AGNITIO S.L. was a voice biometrics technology company with

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Madrid Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...

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. Agnitio was acquired by Bigtincan in October 2020. Biometric authentication uses unique biological characteristics to verify an individual’s identity. It’s harder to spoof and considered more convenient for some users since they do not have to remember passwords or worry about passwords being stolen. Agnitio provides

voice biometrics Speaker recognition is the identification of a person from characteristics of voices. It is used to answer the question "Who is speaking?" The term voice recognition can refer to ''speaker recognition'' or speech recognition. Speaker verification ...

services for

homeland security Homeland security is an American national security term for "the national effort to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards where American interests, aspirations, and ways of life can thrive" to ...

and corporate clients.

History

Origins

AGNITIO was founded in 2004 as a spin-off from the Biometric Recognition Group ATVS at the

Technical University of Madrid The Technical University of Madrid or sometimes called Polytechnic University of Madrid ( es, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, UPM) is a public university, located in Madrid, Spain. It was founded in 1971 as the result of merging different Te ...

. Its products are used by police departments in more than 35 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, resulting in AGNITIO being considered a market leader in forensic voice biometrics. On October 19, 2016, Nuance Communications Inc. acquired Agnitio and then Microsoft acquired Nuance.

Market expansion

In addition to forensic applications, voice biometrics is generally considered to be one of the technologies (along with One Time PIN generators such as

SecurID RSA SecurID, formerly referred to as SecurID, is a mechanism developed by RSA for performing two-factor authentication for a user to a network resource. Description The RSA SecurID authentication mechanism consists of a " token"—either ...

) suitable for strong authentication of telephone and electronic transactions. However, unlike token-based One Time PIN generators, voice biometrics does not require the user to have any specific hardware making it more economically suitable for mass-market applications. Users simply need access to a mobile or landline telephone. This makes voice biometrics a very promising technology for

phone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...

and on-line banking, as well as many other corporate voice applications and security needs. Automated password reset procedures, presence monitoring, time and attendance, call center user verification and verification based on free speech are some examples of typical applications that can be front-ended with voice biometrics. AGNITIO's success in the homeland security market attracted

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

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, which was being used to enter deeper into the enterprise/corporate market. KIVOX, AGNITiO's corporate-focused offering, expands upon the inherent benefits of voice biometrics by utilizing the same core technologies found in its homeland security solutions.

Technology

AGNITIO develops both forensic and real time speaker identification services, such as BATVOX, as well as speaker authentication applications (see Verification vs. identification) that share the same text-independent technology core. In addition, a text-dependent, digit based voice biometric authentication service is offered for corporate implementors. AGNITIO's core technologies were based on the

NIST The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

-evaluated, ATVS biometrics technology, which was transferred to AGNITIO as part of its founding.

Controversy

In 2013 Agnitio appeared in

WikiLeaks WikiLeaks () is an international Nonprofit organization, non-profit organisation that published news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous Source (journalism), sources. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activism, Internet acti ...

Spyfiles as an example of mass surveillance technology used by world intelligence agencies. The event raised doubts about some Agnitio customers.

References