Ask the Chatbot Games & Quizzes History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals & Nature Geography & Travel Arts & Culture ProCon Money Videos
voice identification
Introduction References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics
Quick Facts
Britannica AI Icon
Adding us as a Preferred Source tells Google you trust our content, so our articles show up more often in your Google Search, Discover feed, and AI Overviews.
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

External Websites

voice identification

police technique
Also known as: voicegraph, voiceprint
Written and fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
Britannica Editors
History

voice identification, police technique for identifying individuals by the time, frequency, and intensity of their speech-sound waves. A sound spectrograph is employed to record these waves in the form of a graph that may be compared to graphs of other individuals and differentiated. Though voice graphs (or voiceprints) have been used in courtroom proceedings, the accuracy of this technique in identifying individuals is a subject of controversy among speech scientists.