VoiceTrust: An interview with CEO Tariq Habib

Tariq Habib is a busy guy.

As CEO of VoiceTrust, he’s often travelling to promote VoiceTrust and spends a lot of time engaging with customers, listening to their feedback, and looking for new avenues of innovation for voice biometrics and for the technology VoiceTrust has spent years building.

Originally established as a German company 10 years ago, VoiceTrust was acquired as a part of an investment portfolio in 2008. Habib has been at the helm since 2010 and is thrilled with the company’s progress, market position and trajectory down the road.

“What you see now [from VoiceTrust] has been created anew, fresh,” Habib said of the post-acquisition company. “It has been made completely in-house and is based on our own R&D and our exclusive R&D partnership we have with CRIM.”

With a master’s degree in electronics, and a PhD in innovation management, Habib is no stranger to the technology world. Now, as CEO of VoiceTrust, he’s excited to develop and nurture what the company internally calls the “next Google.”

According to Habib, VoiceTrust is a market leader in voice biometrics and voice authentication and that’s no coincidence.

He says the product is so easy to use; it’s basically a plug-and-play solution for business owners.

“There is no programming; there is no biometric level of understanding or complexity to deal with,” Habib said. “Our customer response is very positive.”

The company offers a number of voice authentication and voice biometrics services, including VTAssure – the company’s flagship authentication platform, and VTADP – an application delivery platform. VoiceTrust also offers text-dependent, text-independent and text-prompting services.

Reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, VoiceTrust was recently selected by the United Bank for the delivery of voice biometric solutions for customer authentication.

Shortly after the company’s acquisition, in 2011, Habib says VoiceTrust was able to integrate its technology with some big names in the market as early adopters.

Another major selling point for the company, according to Habib, is that its biometric engine has the smallest footprint as an embedded system. “It’s completely self-contained,” Habib said. “We have embedded it on 8-bit CPUs.”

BiometricUpdate.com recently took a look an extended look at voice biometrics as a modality, including some early examples, as well as an exploration of potential developments and innovations. Read the full feature here.

In terms of what’s next for VoiceTrust, or where it’s headed, Habib has a positive outlook.

“If I look at the focus that we have created so far, and how the market has responded, I see ourselves maintaining our leadership position in creating this technology, but also innovating use cases.”

“I can also see a possibility where we are working with leaders in the space to embed [our] technology at the device level – right in the hardware. This will become a completely seamless experience for end-users,” Habib said.

“Authentication will not be an effort, but will be a commodity built into some of these [mobile devices].”

Article Topics

authentication  |  interview  |  voice  |  voice biometrics  |  VoiceTrust