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A Comparison of Human and Machine Estimation of Speaker Age

Huckvale, MA; Webb, A; (2015) A Comparison of Human and Machine Estimation of Speaker Age. In: Statistical Language and Speech Processing Third International Conference, SLSP 2015, Budapest, Hungary, November 24-26, 2015, Proceedings. Springer: Amsterdam, Netherlands. Green open access

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Abstract

The estimation of the age of a speaker from his or her voice has both forensic and commercial applications. Previous studies have shown that human listeners are able to estimate the age of a speaker to within 10 years on average, while recent machine age estimation systems seem to show superior performance with average errors as low as 6 years. However the machine studies have used highly non-uniform test sets, for which knowledge of the age distribution offers considerable advantage to the system. In this study we compare human and machine performance on the same test data chosen to be uniformly distributed in age. We show that in this case human and machine accuracy is more similar with average errors of 9.8 and 8.6 years respectively, although if panels of listeners are consulted, human accuracy can be improved to a value closer to 7.5 years. Both human and machines have difficulty in accurately predicting the ages of older speakers.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: A Comparison of Human and Machine Estimation of Speaker Age
Event: Third International Conference Statistical Language and Speech Processing, November 24-26, 2015, Budapest, Hungary
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Dates: 24 November 2015 - 26 November 2015
ISBN-13: 978-3-319-25788-4
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-25789-1_1
Publisher version: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-25...
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Speaker profiling, Age prediction, Paralinguistics
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1473301
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