Global Bilgi and Nuance Power Turkcell’s Voice Signature Service
Nuance’s Voice Biometric Solutions Help Reduce Caller Communication Time, Make Transactions More Secure

BURLINGTON, Mass., – April 6, 2011 - Nuance Communications, a leading provider of speech solutions, today announced that its advanced voice biometrics product VocalPassword is being used in Global Bilgi’s ‘Voice Signature’ service for Turkcell, a leading mobile operator in Turkey.

 

Nuance’s VocalPassword delivers automated remote verification based on individual voices for Global Bilgi’s voice signature service and can handle millions of voiceprints helping to address the security demands of a leading telecom service provider as Turkcell. The service allows Turkcell subscribers to use the personal biometric characteristics of their voice to conduct transactions easily and safely by phone. The identification approval is done automatically and therefore reducing the communication period by 20 seconds for individual subscribers and 40 seconds for corporate subscribers.

 

“Given that VocalPassword so accurately captures the complex voice characteristics of each enrolled individual, our voice prints are infinitely more secure tokens than a credit card number or a PIN. Voice is also the only biometric that can be verified remotely over any phone, making it the most convenient biometric to use,” said Dan Faulkner, vice president, product management and marketing at Nuance Communications. “We are very pleased by the success of Turkcell’s service, it clearly helps them to make identification and verification more convenient, faster and more secure for their customers.”

 

Fahri Arkan, assistant general manager of information technologies at Turkcell Global Bilgi, says: “As a pioneer service in Turkey, we first launched this system for a limited number of subscribers, but it attracted more attention than we had expected and reached 2 million users in a short time. Customers like the very simple and fast authentication process of only 5 seconds.”

 

Tarkan Ersubaşı, Speechouse CEO, states: “With ‘Voice Signature’ we present an innovative authentication system that Turkcell customers can easily adopt. We are happy about the increased customer satisfaction and will continue to add speed and value to the processes of our business partners.”

 

Nuance has a long standing relationship with both Speechouse, Nuance’s professional services partner, and Global Bilgi to deploy speech solutions in Turkey. Already in 2009 Turkcell offered the first fully speech-enabled service in Turkey to provide a new payment system making transactions faster, more convenient and efficient for their customer. That new service offered Turkcell’s prepaid subscribers an easy-to-use interface based on Nuance speech technology for purchasing additional call units by using their credit card.

 

About Global Bilgi

Global Bilgi, a member of Turkcell Group, was founded in October 1999 and serves as a Customer Relationship Management Centre to leading companies of Turkey mainly in telecommunication and media industries. In line with integrated channel management philosophy, Global Bilgi not only operates with Call Center (launced video call center services in 2009) channel but also serves via Self Service Channels and face to face channels handling more than 700 million customer contacts per year. In addition to fundamental customer services, Global Bilgi develops customized solutions which bring strategic and competitive advantages for corporate customers. For more information, please visit www.globalbilgi.com.tr

 

About SPEECHOUSE

Formed in 2006, SPEECHOUSE offers to furnish its customers with solutions using best of breed Speech technologies that use natural speech to give information or perform transactions over the phone. SPEECHOUSE uses Speech Recognition, Voice Verification and Text-to-Speech technologies to offer services designed to meet the specific needs of its customers, thus helping companies to successfully meet the high call volumes confronted at live environments and enabling them to reduce operational costs, improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, differentiate and stay ahead of the competition. For more information, please visit www.speechouse.com

 

About Nuance Communications

Nuance is a leading provider of speech and customer interaction solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications and professional services. For more information, please visit: www.nuance.com