Could Payments Be Made With A Voice Soon?

Biometrics has the potential to be a game changer when it comes to credit card fraud. When you think of biometrics you probably think of your fingerprint (already in use with credit cards) or retina scans (that’ll be kind of tricky) but did you ever think about your voice? Consumers may soon be able to make purchases with their voice.

Biometrics

Google has long been at the forefront of new technology and their own payment product Google Pay has been one of the world’s leaders when it comes to payment technology. With mobile payment technology in its infancy the possibilities of what it can do is potentially limitless. 

Could the next great innovation be the ability to make a payment using a person’s voice? That’s what Google is trying to do. Of course Google has voice recognition software incorporated into its technology so it is already readily available. In theory it would not be hard to incorporate that to recognize a person’s voice and to be able to authenticate it, at least in theory.

Can This Work?

Voice recognition software has come a long way even in the last five years. Is it perfect? No. Could there be an issue with the software misinterpreting what a person is saying? Possibly but most of those wrinkles have been ironed out. That is not the main problem.

The main problem will be, of course, recognizing a person’s voice. How will background noise affect it? How will it work with someone with say, a cold work? At the same time you have seen voice actors (think of someone like Frank Caliendo) who can impersonate voices well. Will the software be good enough to pick up on that? At the same time other technology makes it easy for someone to record and even manipulate a person’s voice. Could this be used to overcome this?

The other question is how much quicker will this be as opposed to dipping a card or using NFC technology? Considering how quickly those transactions can be processed within a few seconds will this provide a decided advantage over current technology? 

In the end Google is one of the few companies that could make something like this work. It will be interesting to see if this can be done and if it will be viable but it will take time to be developed so we will probably not see anything about this for several more years.