Speaker Characteristics

In this chapter, we give a brief introduction to speech-driven applications in order to motivate why it is desirable to automatically recognize particular speaker characteristics from speech. Starting from these applications, we derive what kind of characteristics might be useful. After categorizing relevant speaker characteristics, we describe in more detail language, accent, dialect, idiolect, and sociolect. Next, we briefly summarize classification approaches to illustrate how these characteristics can be recognized automatically, and conclude with a practical example of a system implementation that performs well on the classification of various speaker characteristics.