We Can Identify A Friend’s Voice After

Hearing Just Two Words

Humans are smarter than machines when it comes to voice recognition.

The human voice carries a

great deal of information about
who people are — information
that can be decoded in a way
that allows us to rapidly identify
individuals and traits.

In fact, humans have such

sophisticated vocal recognition
abilities that we can outperform
state-of-the-art machines
designed for the same purpose.

In a new study, which was presented at the International Congress of

Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow in August, linguists from the University of
Montreal in Quebec found that more than 99 percent of the time, two
words are enough for a person of normal hearing to distinguish the voice
of a close friend or relative among other voices.

For the study, phoneticists created a “voice lineup,” which operated

similarly to when the police line up a group of individuals with similar
physical features before a witness. But in the voice lineup, several voices
with similar acoustic properties were presented sequentially, with
recordings of each voice uttering between one and 18 syllables.

A group of 44 French-speaking adult participants listened to a voice

lineup featuring both the voice of a close friend or family member, and
other similar-sounding voices.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voice-recognition-study_n_5617c7b2e4b0082030a2071d
 The researchers found that the participants could identify the voices
of their loved ones with 99.9 percent accuracy after hearing just four
syllables — in this case, “merci beaucoup.” In contrast, machines have
only a 92 percent chance of correctly identifying a voice.

“The auditory capacities of humans are exceptional in terms of

identifying familiar voices,” Julien Plante-Hébert, a PhD candidate at the
university and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “At birth, babies
can already recognize the voice of their mothers and distinguish the sounds
of foreign languages.”

This is because humans have a sophisticated sensory memory, which

gives us the ability to record and later recall vast amounts of speech,
including contextual information about what is being said and how.

“While advanced technologies are able to capture a large amount of

speech information, only humans, so far, are able to recognize familiar
voices with almost total accuracy,” Plante-Hébert said.

These findings can potentially be applied in both legal proceedings

— where witnesses might be able to identify suspects based on limited
audio information — and in clinical settings.

“In developmental disorders such as autism, children have difficulty

in recognizing the mother’s voice,” Plante-Hébert told The Huffington
Post in an email. “Examining normal voice-recognition abilities can orient
research on the processes involved in sensory memory.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voice-recognition-study_n_5617c7b2e4b0082030a2071d