On the eve of the SpeechTek trade show, which begins today and runs through Thursday in New York City, Brian Garr, IBM's director for enterprise speech, said the company is likely to release products with the speaker verification feature "within the next 12 months."

Speaker verification, also known as voice-print recognition, can be used by companies to authenticate customers over the telephone and serve as a spoken equivalent to a password. If and when laws adapt, it could also eventually serve as a legal proxy for a written signature.

For speakers' identities to be identified, they would first have to provide a sample of their voice.

"You could say very little. It could be just a single sentence, like 'My name is my password,'" Garr said. "You could register in English, and then later verify in French or German. As far as I know, we're the only company that can do that."

IBM does not yet boast such technology in its chief voice product, WebSphere Voice Server. But Garr said that the product, used by 87,000 customers as a way to enhance customer service, has important back-end technology that enables companies to integrate it with other WebSphere middleware products such as its WebSphere Application Server.