That's true, @dcawrey, when you think back to the early iterations of voice-controlled texts, for example, they were excrutiatingly painful to use because you had to enunciate everything so slowly. In fact, it was faster for me to type vs. speak! Nowadays, I love the talk-to-text capabilities of my phone.

No matter what ID method may be used there's going to be times when you can't get past "go."  The voice recognition method seems to be the best of all worlds if the kinks can get worked out. Very secure and useable unless one loses their voice. Probably though, a future will see a combination of eye, voice, fingerprint and who knows what else to get passed that door.

Any type of bio-identification is secure enough. The bad guys for the most part could care less. Why bother when they can get the digitized sample file much easier. 

I expressed a variant of this, somewhat humorously, on my forum in post entitled Getting Locked Out.  As a single person living alone, I contemplated how easy it would be to find myself locked out of my own apartment, with no money, no phone and no car just by having the contents of my locker robbed at the gym.

I then ran through various schemes of leaving duplicate keys and whatnot all around...but I realized what I really needed was "The System" to be able to identify me even if walking around in my skivvies and then be able to unlock the gates, or let me take a cab, get money from the bank, have clothes delivered...whatever it takes!

It's not only passwords which are way too brittle, but our whole society which is has become technologically dependent and then yet our identity resides on a few pieces of plastic and chips we carry around in our pants pocket!!

Melding together several metrics does indeed sound promising. Using some combination of voice, fingerprints and -- who knows? -- keyboard typing rhythm, facial recognition, and retina scans would enable users to continue to be identified even if one or more metric is distorted or compromised, while making it harder for intruders to break in. 

One thing is clear: Passwords are fundamentally broken. They were designed for the 1980s, when a person had two or three passwords to remember at most. Now, people have hundreds of passwords. The advice people get for password security is laughable -- nobody has time for all that nonsense of generating and keeping track of 12-digit passwords mixing uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers?

Alison, I'll have to look at that WaPo article. I'm not sure how insoles for biometrics would work. I mean, sure, my shoes would know who I am but how useful is that?

Sure, if it were one metric, it would have to be exact.  But when you meld togther several then you can be a little fuzzy on each with the total giving you a really good match.  And now I read they are doing a lot with "age projection" where they can estimate how a person would look after 5 or 10 years.   

I think voice is a really good option for authentication. Like Alison said, it is not intrusive. We're also starting to see phones and othe devices work via voice fairly well so using it as a "gateway" makes sense. There may come a time where a lot of work interfacing with digital devices will be done with voice commands. The technology is only going to get better and may make security less of a headache. There will be less passwords to remember when you can use your vocal cords!

There is the Maxwell Smart shoe. Actually, it's got nothing to do with the TV show, but Carnegie-Mellon researchers are working on insoles for biometrics, the Washington Post wrote several months ago. They're basing their research on the fact that people have a unique gait--but, of course, gaits change with age, accident, illness, etc. 

Well, I hate to be grotesque, and I don't know what part of the world you live in, but quite frankly if my bank account could be drained with a thumbprint, I'd be walking round with iron gloves on.   I have been using index finger id to get into 24 Hour Fitness for 3 years now and I like it, but I'd like to keep my fingers close to the rest of my body.   Voice sounds a lot less "invasive" but really why not mix all together...face, voice, print, passcode, shoe size...etc.