Transmission channel effects on human speaker identification in multiparty conference calls

Telecommunication systems available today allow efficient voice transmission through channels of different audio bandwidths and terminated with different user interfaces. However, the sending and receiving user interface, the bandwidth limitation and the effects of lossy signal compression degrade the quality of the received signal and impede an unequivocal recognition of the talker. In the present work the performance of a group of human listeners identifying speakers under different conditions is assessed by transmitting a set of multi-speaker conversations through networks and user interfaces of diverse characteristics. After learning the voices of the participants of the phone calls in clean conditions, listeners identified the talkers while listening to the degraded conversations, being more accurate for particular transmission scenarios. The results show that human speaker identification can be considered as an additional criterion when judging the benefits of enhanced bandwidths.