Effects of Vocal Effort and Speaking Style on Text-Independent Speaker Verification

Abstract

We study the question of how intrinsic variations (associated with the speaker rather than the recording environment) affect text-independent speaker verification performance. Experiments using the SRI-FRTIV corpus, which systematically varies both vocal effort and speaking style, reveal that (1) “furtive”speech poses a significant challenge; (2) conversations and interviews, despite stylistic differences, are well matched; (3) high-effort oration, in contrast to high-effort read speech, shares characteristics with conversational and interview styles; and (4) train/test pairings are generally symmetrical. Implications for further work in the area are discussed.