He has rolled out his voice identification technology to New Zealand's tax office but the feeling has been bittersweet.

While the Kiwis and other countries have welcomed him with open arms, he says he has had no opportunity to tender for the same sort of project in his home town.

The technology of a US company, Nuance Communications, will be used when the Australian Tax Office starts gathering the voices of customers from next month so they can quickly identify themselves on the phone - a project that will replace the labour of 100 full-time equivalent staff and helps oust pins, passwords and secret questions.

''I never saw a tender,'' Dr Summerfield said. ''It's not a good look for the Australian government's commitment to supporting local technological innovation.''

He said his technology for New Zealand Inland Revenue was dealing with 800,000 taxpayers and processing 55 per cent of all calls, which meant more than one in four adult New Zealanders had a voice print on his ArmorVox system.

''In terms of the proportion of the population using voice biometrics, it is way ahead of any other deployment that I know of [in the world],'' he said.

Optus Networks won a $324 million open tender in 2009 to provide the ATO with phone, data, video conferencing and contact centre technology. A small fraction of this agreement referred to the potential need of voice identification, which was an emerging technology at the time.

The ATO says that when the need arose Optus subcontracted Nuance Communications.

Optus did not comment when contacted.

Even though the original tender won by Optus was far more broad-ranging than the need for voice identification, a spokesman for the ATO said it had still been a good opportunity for anyone to express interest.

In response, Dr Summerfield said: ''ArmorVox was not available in 2009 - that was five years ago now. Technology moves on.''

The ATO will save each customer 45 seconds per phone call once they give their voice print. A voice print has 96 points of identification, while a fingerprint only has 26.

The ATO confirmed all data would remain in Australia under the terms of the contract.

''The ATO is confident that the solution being delivered meets our requirements and is underpinned by one of the market-leading voice biometric technology providers,'' the spokesman said.

Dr Summerfield said the Australian government had ''only scratched the surface'' in terms of how much it could use biometric data.

He said the Department of Immigration and Border Protection was continually looking to use more biometrics to stop visa fraudsters entering the country.

Voice prints, iris scanning and fingerprints had the ability to replace security in government buildings and in doing so replace the traditional security pass, which was often worn on a lanyard and could be lost or stolen.