Automated age verification and payment solution

In 2004, O2 appointed Eckoh to develop an automated solution for age verification and parental control requirements. O2 introduced the age verification requirement to ensure that commercial content services classified as "18" are only available to adult users.

How does the automated age verification service work?
To verify their age, callers simply dial into the service where the system automatically identifies the caller by their mobile number and then uses advanced speech recognition to collect the details required from the caller to perform age verification to O2's robust standard. On successful verification, the service updates the profile held by O2 to enable the caller to access content and services classified as 18.

Parental Control Solution
The solution also provides a simple way for users to configure O2's new parental control service. Parental control is designed to help parents ensure the safety of their children by restricting access to Internet sites available through mobiles.

All calls handled from the service are handled on Eckoh's highly scaleable call processing platform capable of handling up to 650,000 calls per hour or 8,000 calls concurrently.

Jonny Shipp, Head of Content Standards at O2

"The introduction of the age verification service is one of the core elements of our programme to restrict children's access to content. We needed a service provider who had the necessary expertise and technical infrastructure to deliver an extremely robust solution together with experience of operating high volume speech recognition applications."