18. A contact center comprising: an agent desktop comprising a standard HTTP browser and a standard phone, wherein the agent desktop is configured to permit a human agent to handle call center communications; a portal server configured to provide an agent portal, through which the human agent utilizing the agent desktop communicates, said agent portal including a plurality of agent portlets within which contact center information is presented, wherein a speech identification and verification (SIV) component determines whether the human agent that logged into the contact center with a user identifier uniquely assigned to the human agent is indeed the human agent involved in the contact center sessions; an application server executing contact center applications configured to receive input for the contact center applications from the agent portlets and to present contact center output through the agent portlets; and the SIV component configured to analyze speech utterances and configured to determine a speaker identity based upon biometric characteristics of the analyzed speech utterances, wherein said SIV component processes speech from contact center sessions to automatically identify whether a segment of speech content spoken during a contact center session between a caller and a human using the agent desktop, was spoken by the human agent of the contact center or not based upon comparing biometric characteristics of the segment of speech content with previously stored biometric characteristics of the human agent, wherein said SIV component determines whether the human agent that logged into the contact center is the human agent involved in the contact center sessions.
19. The contact center of claim 18 , wherein communications between the agent desktop and that contact center conform to open standards, said open standards consisting of a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) based standard and a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based standard.