A method for identifying a user among a plurality of users of a multimedia system including one or more devices for providing multimedia content from one or more sources of digital information, in order to provide individually adjusted access and control of multimedia content from the multimedia system, the method comprising the steps of: providing a collection of i-vector sets, each i-vector set including i-vectors based on one or more words spoken by a user of the multimedia system and being associated with an access profile of this user, acquiring a speech utterance from a current user, and extracting an i-vector for the speech utterance using total variability modeling, comparing the extracted i-vector with each i-vector set in the collection, in order to identify a target set most similar to the extracted i-vector, granting, to the current user, access to the multimedia system in accordance with the access profile associated with the identified target set, wherein the speech utterance is acquired using one of a plurality of sources, and wherein the method further comprises minimizing source variation in the total variability modeling by: for each data source, estimating a source-specific informative prior, which is defined by a mean and a covariance, and for each speech utterance acquired using a specific data source, re-centering first-order statistics of the speech utterance around the mean of the informative prior associated with the source, and using the co-variance of the informative prior associated with the source when extracting the i-vector for the speech utterance. providing a collection of i-vector sets, each i-vector set including i-vectors based on one or more words spoken by a user of the multimedia system and being associated with an access profile of this user, acquiring a speech utterance from a current user, and extracting an i-vector for the speech utterance using total variability modeling, comparing the extracted i-vector with each i-vector set in the collection, in order to identify a target set most similar to the extracted i-vector, granting, to the current user, access to the multimedia system in accordance with the access profile associated with the identified target set, wherein the speech utterance is acquired using one of a plurality of sources, and wherein the method further comprises minimizing source variation in the total variability modeling by: for each data source, estimating a source-specific informative prior, which is defined by a mean and a covariance, and for each speech utterance acquired using a specific data source, re-centering first-order statistics of the speech utterance around the mean of the informative prior associated with the source, and using the co-variance of the informative prior associated with the source when extracting the i-vector for the speech utterance. for each data source, estimating a source-specific informative prior, which is defined by a mean and a covariance, and for each speech utterance acquired using a specific data source, re-centering first-order statistics of the speech utterance around the mean of the informative prior associated with the source, and using the co-variance of the informative prior associated with the source when extracting the i-vector for the speech utterance.