Speaker recognition—Identifying people by their voices

The usefulness of identifying a person from the characteristics of his voice is increasing with the growing importance of automatic information processing and telecommunications. This paper reviews the voice characteristics and identification techniques used in recognizing people by their voices. A discussion of inherent performance limitations, along with a review of the performance achieved by listening, visual examination of spectrograms, and automatic computer techniques, attempts to provide a perspective with which to evaluate the potential of speaker recognition and productive directions for research into and application of speaker recognition technology.