Forensic Voice Comparison: Overview

In forensic voice comparison, a forensic practitioner analyzes a recording of a speaker of questioned identity and one or more recordings of a speaker of known identity, and compares the analytical results in order to draw an inference that will assist a legal-decision maker to decide whether the recordings are of the same speaker or of different speakers. This entry provides an overview of analytical approaches (including auditory, spectrographic, acoustic-phonetic, and automatic) and interpretive frameworks (including the likelihood-ratio framework) that have been used in forensic voice comparison. It also briefly discusses legal admissibility and validation of forensic voice comparison.