Dr. Rick Klevans, a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at N.C. State University, is perfecting his automatic speaker recognition system for forensic use. His work, funded by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, may one day allow law enforcement officials to use computers to identify criminals by their voice. Joel Rosch, director of Research and Development for the SBI, said that the system Klevans is developing will be useful when bomb threats happen to be recorded. Klevans' work is not the first attempt to identify people by their voices. The research stalled after a controversy arose over inadequate testing, and scientists shied away from forensic uses, pursuing instead commercial applications such as secured entry systems.
Speaker verification determines whether two voices are the same.
Speaker identification matches an unknown speaker to an individual in a group of known speakers. For example, a threatening call by a woman is recorded, and officers trace it to an office where only six women work. Klevans' system would compare the caller's voice to those six voices and identify the the best match among the suspects. In some cases, such as a bomb threat called in from a pay phone, a database of known speakers will not be available. Potentially, anyone in the country could have made the call.