Milestones in speaker recognition

This article reviews significant research in the domain of speaker recognition, i.e., the task of determining the speaker’s identity from its speech. Unlike conventional review articles, this document strives to be concise and selective, provide a historical context, and reach a wider audience. In this endeavour, a summary of selected key works of every decade is provided which highlights the theme(s) of research of that period. At first, an overview of the humble beginnings of the 1960s and 70s is provided, followed by the key developments in the 80s and 90s. The prime focus of the research community in the 2000s is then discussed, leading to various non-conventional features, modelling techniques, and hybrid or fusion systems. The developments of the last decade (the 2010s), such as the i-vector-based systems, are then discussed. Modern speaker recognition based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as the x-vector system, and refinements of the i-vector-based systems using deep neural networks, are then discussed. The article concludes with a concise discussion of the evolving recent trends and allied research in speaker recognition.