Speaker recognition (also known as voice recognition) is the computing task of recognizing people (which may involve identifying them and/or authenticating their identity) from their voices. Such systems extract features from speech, model them, and use them to recognize the person from his/her voice.

Note that there is a difference between speaker recognition (recognizing who is speaking) and speech recognition (recognizing what is being said). These two terms are frequently confused, as is voice recognition. Voice recognition is a synonym for speaker, and thus not speech, recognition.

Speaker recognition has a history dating back some four decades, where the output of several analog filters was averaged over time for matching. Speaker recognition uses the acoustic features of speech that have been found to differ between individuals. These acoustic patterns reflect both anatomy and learned behavioral patterns. This incorporation of learned patterns into the voice templates (the latter called “voiceprints”) has earned speaker recognition its classification as a “behavioral biometric.”