Preferred Telecom Inc has come up with a novel way of testing whether its voice recognition calling cards are open to fraud. The Dallas-based company left its SecureCard telephone cards in airport bars, restaurants, stores and automatic teller machines in Texas. When passers by tried to use credit on the cards by quoting a card number and password they found the cards wouldn’t work. Callers had come up against the company’s voice recognition system which queries a caller if the voice differs from a set of 20 imprints held on its computers. The company said it continuously update images of each cardholder’s voice in different environments to compensate the fact that people don’t always use the same telephone and their voices may alter slightly. Callers that fail be recognised have to answer some piece of personal information they gave at the time of enrollment. The system works with both pulse and tone telephones and also has a speed dial facility where users can call the office simply by saying the word offi ce. Card holders when abroad connect to the system for the price of a local phone call through an agreement Preferred Telecom has with MCI Communications Corp. Dallas-based Voice Control Systems Inc provided the voice recognition technology and Brite Voice Systems Inc, Wichita, Kansas provides the systems integration. Preferred, which launched the card last month, said that the SecureCard would dramatically reduce the number of calls made using someone else’s card from its current level of between 15% to 30%. Preferred Telecom, which is currently backed with $1m of share capital, is looking for a further cash injection through a second issue of shares.
