Do face coverings affect identifying voices?
Vlog: Do face coverings affect identifying voices?
A small experiment using VOCALISE and PHONATE
In these recent months of 2020, like many others around the world, we have found ourselves adjusting to the new normal of wearing masks in various places like supermarkets and other public spaces. We found ourselves (minorly) annoyed that some biometric identification, like face recognition, doesn’t quite work when wearing masks. This made us wonder how well voice biometric solutions could work when speakers are wearing masks, and we decided to perform a small experiment to analyse this.
Over the last few weeks, we have been performing some small-scale tests of our VOCALISE and PHONATE software against speech spoken from behind a mask. We have found our systems to be quite robust to masked speech – they are able to recognise speakers across different mask-wearing conditions well.
The video below explains our experiment and discusses our findings. We hope that you find it interesting!
