Forensic Voice Comparison
Definition
The examination of two or more voice recordings to assess whether they share a common speaker source, using auditory-acoustic analysis and/or automatic speaker recognition technology, with results typically expressed as a likelihood ratio.
- Examines
- Two or more voice recordings for common speaker source
- Methods
- Auditory-acoustic analysis, automatic speaker recognition
- Result format
- Typically a likelihood ratio
- Related term
- Forensic speaker comparison
Common questions
What is the difference between auditory-acoustic analysis and automatic speaker recognition here?+
Auditory-acoustic analysis relies on a trained phonetician's ear plus measured acoustic features, while automatic speaker recognition uses software trained on large voice datasets to compute a similarity score, and many labs combine both approaches for a stronger conclusion.
Why is a likelihood ratio preferred over a simple match or no-match outcome?+
A likelihood ratio expresses how much more probable the evidence is under one hypothesis than the other, giving the court a graded strength of evidence rather than an overstated binary claim that voices definitely do or do not belong to the same speaker.
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