Recognizing individual voices

Question

I plan to write a conversation analysis software, which will recognize the individual speakers, their pitch and intensity. Pitch and intensity are somewhat straightforward (pitch via autocorrelation).

How would I go about recognizing individual speakers, so I can record his/her features? Will storing some heuristics for each speaker's frequencies be enough? I can assume that only one person speaks at a time (strictly non-overlapping). I can also assume that for training, each speaker can record a minute's worth of data before actual analysis.

Answer 1

Pitch and intensity on their own tell you nothing. You really need to analyse how pitch varies. In order to identify different speakers you need to transform the speech audio into some kind of feature space, and then make comparisons against your database of speakers in this feature space. The general term that you might want to Google for is prosody - see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics). While you're Googling you might also want to read up on speaker identification aka speaker recognition, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_identification