Language-independent, short-enrollment voice verification over a far-field microphone

An approach is presented for the dual verification of speaker identity and verbal content in a text-dependent voice authentication system. The application considered is desktop voice login over a far-field microphone. Each speaker is allowed to select his or her own keyphrase, and enrollment is limited to four instances of the keyphrase, each 1 to 2 seconds of speech. The approach decouples the analysis of speaker and verbal content information, so as to use two light-weight components for verification: a spectral matching component based on a global representation of the entire utterance, and a temporal alignment component based on more conventional frame-level information. The resulting integration is language-independent, and experiments with deliberate imposture show an equal error rate figure of approximately 4%. The approach has been commercially deployed in the "VoicePrint Password" feature of MacOS 9