Automatic speaker recognition technology outperforms human listeners in the courtroom

A key question in a number of court cases is whether a speaker on an audio recording is a particular known speaker, for example, whether a speaker on a recording of an intercepted telephone call is the defendant. In most English-speaking countries, expert testimony is only admissible in a court of law if it will potentially assist the judge or the jury to make a decision. If the judge or the jury's speaker identification were equally accurate or more accurate than a forensic scientist's forensic voice comparison, then the forensic-voice-comparison testimony would not be admissible. In a research paper published in the journal Forensic Science International, a multidisciplinary international team of researchers has reported the first set of results from a comprehensive study that compares the accuracy of speaker-identification by individual listeners (like judges or jury members) with the accuracy of a forensic-voice-comparison system that is based on state-of-the-art automatic-speaker-recognition technology, and that does so using recordings that reflect the conditions of an actual case. The questioned-speaker recording was of a telephone call with background office noise, and the known-speaker recording was of a police interview conducted in echoey room with background ventilation-system noise.