speech recognition products sold less than $200 million (Shaffer, 238). Systems currently on the market include voice-activated dialing for cellular phones, made secure by their recognition and authorization of a single approved caller. International telephone companies such as Sprint are using similar voice recognition systems. Integrated Speech Solution in Massachusetts is investigating speech applications which can take orders for mutual funds prospectuses and account activities (239). Optical Character Recognition Another potential area for transaction security is in the identification of handwriting by optical character recognition systems (OCR). In conventional OCR systems the program matches each letter in a scanned document with a pre-arranged template stored in memory. Most OCR systems are designed specifically for reading forms which are produced for that purpose. Other systems can achieve good results with machine printed text in almost all font styles. However, none of the systems is capable of recognizing handwritten characters. This is because every person writes differently. Nestor, a company based in Providence, Rhode Island has developed handwriting recognition products based on developments in neural network computers. Their system, NestorReader, recognizes handwritten characters by extracting data sets, or feature vectors, from each character. The system processes the input representations using a collection of three by three pixel edge templates (Pennisi, 23). The system then lays a grid over the pixel array and pieces it together to form a letter. Then the network discovers which letter the feature vector most closely matched. The system can learn through trial and error, and it has an accuracy of about 80 percent. Eventually this system will be able to evaluate...
