Ping An Good Doctor, a one-stop healthcare ecosystem platform from China, recently announced that their “Voiceprint Login System” (“Voiceprint Lock”), jointly developed with Unisound, an intelligent voice and language technology company in China, has achieved a login success rate close to 99%. The breakthrough came after several model optimisations and upgrades.

In December 2017, Ping An Good Doctor and Unisound started a joint venture named Shanghai Hao Yi Zhi Neng Technology Company Limited to explore the construction of smart family healthcare service terminals based on technologies such as smart speech recognition.

“Voiceprint Lock” is a voiceprint recognition technique that verifies a speaker’s identity by sound. After a user has read a short random password, the system quickly identifies the speaker’s identity and unlocks their app or phone. Compared with other biometric technologies, voiceprint recognition is relatively easy and convenient to operate by acquiring voices. In April 2018, the “Voiceprint Lock” function was launched on Ping An Good Doctor’s App, which became very popular among users.

Voiceprint recognition has some advantages but not without its drawbacks – for instance, it is not easy to accurately distinguish different sounds. A spokesperson from Ping An Good Doctor said: “We had to overcome several difficulties to achieve accurate voiceprint recognition. Firstly, the accuracy can be affected by the speaker’s condition such as their voice state, health condition and emotional state during the voice recognition process. Secondly, the environment as well as hardware configuration of recognising and transmitting sounds can also affect the accuracy.”

To address some of the above mentioned technical difficulties, the two companies jointly developed a number of technologies, striving to accurately capture human voices and eliminate background noise, and combining this with massive voiceprint data to continuously optimise the model of voiceprint recognition. Since its launch, there has been several iterations of the Voiceprint Lock and the claimed success rate of usage has been close to 99%.

The spokesperson also added that biggest selling points of Voiceprint Lock are its convenience and ease-of-use, especially among the middle-aged and elderly users, along with its strong security. Voiceprint Lock does not use the conventional method of fixed login passwords, but instead uses passwords generated at random to enhance and protect users’ account security and privacy.

Earlier this month, Ping An Good Doctor launched the commercial operation of its One-minute Clinics in China with eight of such clinics across 8 provinces and cities in China. The unstaffed, AI-powered One-minute Clinics currently provide online consultations for more than 2,000 common diseases, and can immediately answer tens of thousands of medical and health queries for users, with an international standard accuracy level.