Voice biometrics in Talkdesk Identity enables callers to enroll and authenticate using two methods: Active (passphrase-based) and Passive (during conversations).
- Active vs Passive Voice Biometrics
- Authentication Status
- How Agents Can Assist
- Identity App and Export Interactions
- Failure Codes and Reasons
Active vs Passive Voice Biometrics
During Active enrollment, the caller is prompted to repeat a pre-determined passphrase. If the enrollment is successful, the caller will be asked to repeat the same passphrase during future authentication attempts.
In Passive enrollment, the caller’s voice patterns are analyzed during the conversation to create a voiceprint. This voiceprint is later compared during subsequent calls to determine the authentication status. For more information, refer to the article for Active and Passive Voice Authentication: Overview.
Authentication Status
In both methods, the caller’s voice is analyzed to generate a risk score (from 0% to 100%). This score determines the authentication status as either “Successful” or “Failed” based on a threshold.
Factors like poor audio quality, incorrect passphrase wording (active authentication), background noise, can lead to a failed enrollment or authentication.
How Agents Can Assist
In the Identity tab of Conversations:
- Agents can view the success or failure status of enrollments or authentications.
- For failures, the reason is displayed (excluding general failures), allowing agents to provide actionable feedback to callers (e.g., move to a quieter area, speak louder) [1].
Agents can also review the history of enrollments and authentications. By hovering over a “Failed” state, they can see specific reasons for the failure [2].
Identity App and Export Interactions
Through the Identity App, users can access a list of analyzed calls, including enrollment and authentication results.
Similar to the Conversations app, hovering over a “failed” status reveals detailed failure reasons [3].
In the Contact Details view, failure reasons are also displayed as tags [4], with additional details available on hover [5].
When exporting interactions to CSV, two new columns provide insights into voice authentication:
- voice_failure_code: Numeric code indicating the failure type.
- voice_failure_reason: Text description of the failure.
Failure Codes and Reasons
In the table below, please find the mapping of possible failures in Identity:
| Code | Reason for Failure | Description |
| 2001* | General Failure | A general failure occurred during the authentication process. |
| 2002 | No speech | No speech was detected when the contact was expected to speak. This often happens when the user is unaware that they should begin speaking, either waiting for an additional prompt or misunderstanding the timing of the authentication process. |
| 2003 | Utterance | The spoken phrase (active authentication) does not match the expected passphrase. For instance, with utterance verification, the user said "My Voice is My Password" instead of the required "My Password is My Voice." This includes both a voice biometric check and phrase verification. |
| 2005 | Replay | The system detected audio that may have been recorded or artificially generated. This could also occur due to poor-quality audio, such as from a weak cellphone signal. Asking the user to retry in better conditions may resolve the issue. |
| 2006 | Second Speaker | A second voice was detected. This failure commonly arises during voiceprint enrollment, where another voice is recorded alongside the user's, compromising the voiceprint's reliability. |
| 2007 | Unverified Voice | The authenticating voice did not match the enrolled voiceprint, suggesting a potential identity mismatch. |
| 2008 | SNR | The audio contains excessive noise, making it difficult to reliably interpret the user's voice. Common causes include wind noise, a noisy background, or the user speaking too quietly. |
| 1002 | Keypress | The caller failed to press the required key after speaking the passphrase (Active authentication), as required in some configurations. |
*Note: For General Failures (2001), detailed information is unavailable in the user interface (Conversations and Identity apps). These cases will appear in exports with the code 2001 and reason as general_failure. We are actively working to improve failure mapping and provide more granular reasons in the future.