Voice Biometrics with VoiceVault and Tropo
Using your voice to verify who you are!
In this post we will review how your business quickly, easily and cost effectively can implement a simple Tropo and VoiceVault based solution to use voice biometrics, the uniqueness of the voices of your customers, to verify a claimed identity.
If you want to read more about why to use VoiceVault’s voice biometrics system check out this excellent page on their website!
To simplify using the VoiceVault API we, at Disruptive Technologies, created a PHP library that can be used with Tropo for both the enrollment and the verification of voices prints. The library is available on Github as part of our sample WordPress Plugin.
We have created this sample implementation to show you how voice biometrics can be used in real life. For the sample implementation we build a WordPress plugin that you can add to any WordPress site to enhance the user Signup and Password Reset functionality with voice biometrics.
The Disruptive Voice BioMetrics WordPress plugin is available on Github and on wordpress.org in the next few days.
After installing the plugin, when a customer registers a new account they will receive a phone call on the phone number they provided during registration, to enroll their voice for authentication. We have also added functionality to give the customer the option to request a password reset and provide them with a temporary WordPress password by calling a phone number and verifying their identity using their voice.
If you want to checkout how the plugin works, first browse to this Sign Up Page and sign up for an account. You will receive a phone call asking you, a couple of times, to speak a 4 digit code, this is used to enroll your voice. After enrolling your voice you can call+1(818) 533-9824 to receive a new temporary password to login to WordPress. Make sure to call from the phone number you registered when you signed up for the WordPress account!
You can install the WordPress plugin in your own WordPress site directly from within WordPress or by downloading the plugin from Github. For the Tropo part of the puzzle we are using a Tropo Web API application that is build using the YII framework. 
YII is a simple but very powerful application framework with a very short learning curve. Its component-based design allows you to customize it for your needs without directly modifying it thus maintaining upgradability.
In the WordPress plugin we are providing a copy of the YII Framework so there is no additional setup you need to do for this, other then mapping a phone number in your Tropo account to the Application and a couple of config settings. If you haven’t setup a Tropo account yet, or don’t know how to setup a Tropo web app, take a look at one of our previous posts or checkout one of the great tutorials on the Tropo website.
To access the VoiceVault API, we use in the plugin, you will need to setup an account with VoiceVault. For development purposes you can create a free developers account on their website, for commercial use reach out to their sales team!
Installation steps:
- Download the plugin and unzip the voicevault directory to your wp-content/plugins directory (if your downloading from GitHub make sure to only upload the voicevault directory)
- Ensure that the uploaded directory has correct ownerships. Also make sure the server has read & write access to the wp-content/plugins/voicevault/ivr/protected/runtime directory, and the wp-content/plugins/voicevault/ivr/protected/data directory
- Activate the plugin on your wordpress plugins page. After activation set up your Tropo phone number on the Settings -> Voice Vault page.
- Set up the configuration settings in wp-content/plugins/voicevault/ivr/protected/config/main.php – the settings are around line 85, and there are two sets of settings in this file: for the wordpress db “wordpress_db” fill out your wordpress database information (Yii uses this to reset the users’ passwords). And, for the voicevault API fill out “voicevault” with your VoiceVault API information.
- Set your Tropo application’s outbound call token in wp-content/plugins/voicevault/voicevault.php
That should be it, have fun!