40 Years of Progress in Automatic Speaker Recognition

Research in automatic speaker recognition has now spanned four decades. This paper surveys the major themes and advances made in the past 40 years of research so as to provide a technological perspective and an appreciation of the fundamental progress that has been accomplished in this important area of speech-based human biometrics. Although many techniques have been developed, many challenges have yet to be overcome before we can achieve the ultimate goal of creating human-like machines. Such a machine needs to be able to deliver satisfactory performance under a broad range of operating conditions. A much greater understanding of the human speech process is still required before automatic speaker recognition systems can approach human performance.