speaker identification/recognition/verification

In PHONETICS and COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, speaker recognition is the acoustic analysis of a speech sample to infer the identity of the speaker; also called voice recognition. In speaker verification, a sample of speech is acoustically analyzed to check a claimed identity against a stored reference sample stored in the computer. This technique is used, for example, in such situations as controlling access to buildings. In speaker identification, a speech sample from a known speaker is compared to one obtained from an unknown speaker, to determine whether the same person is involved. This technique has been most commonly used in criminal cases, where the analysis of spectrograms (as in VOICEPRINTING) has been used to investigate whether the speaker in a tape-recording is the same as a suspect.