The CAVE speaker verification project — Experiments on the YOHO and SESP corpora

Abstract

Many businesses, such as banks, will soon be under pressure to improve the functionality and friendliness of their telephone-based services without compromising security. Current automatic services authenticate callers with a PIN-code and consequently are not secure enough to offer callers the chance to carry out significant transactions; more sophisticated services necessarily depend on a human agent and demand lengthy authentication procedures. The technology of speaker verification (SV) has the potential to deliver fast and secure caller authentication for automatic or operator-assisted telephone services. This paper gives an overview of the work of the CAVE consortium, a pan-European group researching the application of SV to automatic telephone-based banking and calling-card services. Results obtained in experimental work so far compare favourably with the state-of-the-art.