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Concept
Speaker recognition
Summary
Speaker recognition is the identification of a person from characteristics of voices. It is used to answer the question "Who is speaking?" The term voice recognition can refer to speaker recognition or speech recognition. Speaker verification (also called speaker authentication) contrasts with identification, and speaker recognition differs from speaker diarisation (recognizing when the same speaker is speaking).
Recognizing the speaker can simplify the task of translating speech in systems that have been trained on specific voices or it can be used to authenticate or verify the identity of a speaker as part of a security process. Speaker recognition has a history dating back some four decades as of 2019 and uses the acoustic features of speech that have been found to differ between individuals. These acoustic patterns reflect both anatomy and learned behavioral patterns.
There are two major applications of speaker recognition technologies and methodologies. If the speaker claims to be of a certain identity and the voice is used to verify this claim, this is called verification or authentication. On the other hand, identification is the task of determining an unknown speaker's identity. In a sense, speaker verification is a 1:1 match where one speaker's voice is matched to a particular template whereas speaker identification is a 1:N match where the voice is compared against multiple templates.
From a security perspective, identification is different from verification. Speaker verification is usually employed as a "gatekeeper" in order to provide access to a secure system. These systems operate with the users' knowledge and typically require their cooperation. Speaker identification systems can also be implemented covertly without the user's knowledge to identify talkers in a discussion, alert automated systems of speaker changes, check if a user is already enrolled in a system, etc.
In forensic applications, it is common to first perform a speaker identification process to create a list of "best matches" and then perform a series of verification processes to determine a conclusive match.
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