Speaker identification

In computer science, speaker identification (also, speaker verification) is the problem of identifying a person solely by their speech. It can be used for purposes such as police investigations and intelligence and security applications that use a voice print to replace typed passwords and PIN numbers.

Speaker identification problems generally fall into two categories:


 * Differentiating multiple speakers when a conversation is taking place.
 * Identifying an individual's voice based upon previously supplied data regarding that individual's voice.

The first is important for speech recognition software and the second for the purpose of biometrics, however recent evidence from linguistics has raised doubts about the security of using speaker identification as a means of user authentication.

Speaker identification is based on complex voice processing algorithms.