Speaker discrimination in humans and machines: Effects of speaking style variability

Amber Afshan; Jody Kreiman; Abeer Alwan

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2008.03617

Speaker discrimination in humans and machines: Effects of speaking style variability

Amber Afshan·Jody Kreiman·Abeer Alwan

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Does speaking style variation affect humans' ability to distinguish individuals from their voices? How do humans compare with automatic systems designed to discriminate between voices? In this paper, we attempt to answer these questions by comparing human and machine speaker discrimination performance for read speech versus casual conversations. Thirty listeners were asked to perform a same versus different speaker task. Their performance was compared to a state-of-the-art x-vector/PLDA-based automatic speaker verification system. Results showed that both humans and machines performed better with style-matched stimuli, and human performance was better when listeners were native speakers of American English. Native listeners performed better than machines in the style-matched conditions (EERs of 6.96% versus 14.35% for read speech, and 15.12% versus 19.87%, for conversations), but for style-mismatched conditions, there was no significant difference between native listeners and machines. In all conditions, fusing human responses with machine results showed improvements compared to each alone, suggesting that humans and machines have different approaches to speaker discrimination tasks. Differences in the approaches were further confirmed by examining results for individual speakers which showed that the perception of distinct and confused speakers differed between human listeners and machines.

Explore related subjects

eess.AS cs.LG eess.SP

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Amber Afshan, Jody Kreiman, Abeer Alwan. 2020-08-08. Speaker discrimination in humans and machines: Effects of speaking style variability. https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03617

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Diarization Error Decomposition Under Pause Annotation Ambiguity

Speaker diarization evaluation is sensitive to ambiguity in pause annotation, which can inflate diarization error rate (DER) or obscure genuine model errors. We show that morphological closing, which has been used for pause-tolerant diarization evaluation, discards segment-level distinctions. Instead, we propose an exact, overlap-aware decomposition of standard DER into a pause-attributable component, consisting of errors compatible with pause filling, and a residual core component that can serve as a proxy for intrinsic diarization errors. The decomposition leaves DER unchanged, while the pause-attributable and core components vary monotonically with the pause threshold and eventually saturate. Experiments spanning synthetic transformations, annotation mismatch, cross-domain evaluation, and tight-boundary diarization show that the decomposition reveals error sources not apparent from standard DER.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Less can be More: What Aspects of Speech Drive End-of-Turn Detection

In conversational AI, detecting when a speaker has finished talking is crucial for natural turn taking. While recent work incorporates semantics, the relative contribution of different modalities remains unclear. We present a controlled ablation of acoustic, prosodic, and semantic signals for streaming end of turn detection using a lightweight trimodal classifier. Under identical training conditions, the acoustic prosodic combination achieves the best balance of accuracy and latency, achieving utterance F1 of 0.93 with 7.8% false alarms at 400ms median latency. Adding text increases premature detections without improving performance. Feature space analysis confirms that prosodic features have the strongest class separability, while text representations overlap substantially. These findings suggest that turn-taking is primarily conveyed through intonation and silence patterns rather than semantic completeness, enabling faster and more reliable systems without expensive text inference.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Downstream-Task-Aware Unified Source Separation

Task-aware unified source separation (TUSS) enables a single model to handle diverse separation tasks by conditioning on input prompts. However, conventional TUSS does not account for downstream task requirements, such as whether the enhanced speech will be used for human listening or automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we propose a prompt extension framework for TUSS that incorporates downstream task information into the input prompts and switches the loss function according to the given prompt during training, enabling outputs with different signal characteristics at inference time. Specifically, we introduce an ASR-dedicated prompt paired with a regularized loss function that reduces speech artifacts to improve ASR robustness, while the standard prompt is paired with the conventional SNR loss function. Experiments on the LibriSpeech and JNAS corpora demonstrate that the proposed joint-training scheme enables a single model to improve ASR performance over noisy input across a wide range of SNR conditions by selecting the ASR-dedicated prompt, while maintaining general speech enhancement quality when the standard prompt is used.

eess.AS↗