Glossary
Voice Authentication
Voice authentication verifies identity based on characteristics of a person's voice, which suits interfaces where typing a password or holding a device isn't practical — a hands-free assistant, a phone-based system. Its convenience comes with a real weakness: voice is easier to capture and, increasingly, to synthesize convincingly than most other biometric or possession-based factors, and a recording or a synthesized voice can potentially satisfy a check that isn't specifically designed to detect that.
Because of this, voice authentication is generally better suited to identifying a likely speaker for a low-stakes interaction than to authorizing anything consequential on its own — pairing it with an additional factor for higher-stakes actions addresses the gap a voice sample alone leaves open.