Hacker News Reader

Comment by pacala | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, customer service of your average corporation is likely to already have voice fingerprinting in place.

I asked my mobile provider (Rogers) if they had any alternatives to storing my birth date as my account verification method and they offered to enrol me in their voice print program. I declined.

Well, the main identification method should have been calling from their own phone (from their own system), but who knows why they're not doing that.

Why not just lie and give them a fake birthday?

It's not like you can't give them false information.

Someone knowing your birthdate isn't really a big deal anyway

Social Security, dark web crackers, and crappy online forgotten passwords websites want to know your location. I jest. But seriously, DOB is extremely valuable, which is why I never use my real one online except for government stuff like that.

To the poster it sounded like he didn't want to hand that info over. I don't know the reason, I was just providing a fairly simple solution.

Also dob is frequently used as a verification. So it is kind of a big deal.

Maybe that's the point. It's not a very secure method of verification, so it is sensible to want something better, like an ad hoc secret phrase.

probably because it's cross referenced with your credit file, which they check when starting any post-paid plan.

In Dutch the standard recording says "this conversation can be recorded for training purposes" (to train new people, presumably). This just puts that in an entirely new light... cough AI cough

My voice fingerprint would be interesting because if it is one of those terrible voice prompt systems I am aggressively swearing at it, combined with extremely calm and pleasant tone with an actual person.

There are a couple of systems I've said "no your fucking menu options didn't change, I want to talk to a fucking human being" and was instantly connected. My thought was, "wait that worked?"

It's a feature!

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z444dx/if-you-swe...

Some automated systems are supposed to detect irate tone and expedite connection to a human. I’ve tried triggering this a few times but never had any luck.

Interesting, I honestly will swear up a storm as soon as I hear their crappy automated system. Then be extremely nice to the actual person. And rate them afterwards on the survey very highly. A few times I've actually gone out of my way to ask for their manager to tell them how great the CSR was.

Somewhere my customer records at some company must say: "this guy really hates voice prompts, but is also very pleasant and amenable to working through a problem with patience"

https://www.aculab.com/gateways-platforms-and-services/voice...

Can you provide references to back this up? Is it opt-in ?

Not a reference per se, but I've noticed that several companies are now explicit that they're doing this. Chase's standard "This call may be monitored or recorded" has morphed into something like "This call may be monitored or recorded, and used for identification purposes", and Schwab has you repeat the phrase "At Schwab, my voice is my password" before they let you talk to a rep.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com