Listener performance in speaker verification tasks

The ability of listeners to perform some speaker verification tasks has been measured experimentally and compared with the performance of an automatic system for speaker verification. A test presentation in the subjective experiments consists of a pair of utterances. One of these is drawn from the recordings of a group of speakers designated customers while the second utterance is either a distinct recording from the same customer or the recording of an impostor. Listeners must respond whether the utterances are from the same or different speakers. The impostor classes that have been considered are casual impostors making no attempt to mimic customers, trained professional mimics, and an identical twin of a customer. Listener performance is specified by the two types of error that can be committed.