Comparison of Human Speaker Identification of Known Voices Transmitted Through Narrowband and Wideband Communication Systems

The traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is the primary platform for voice communications and is commonly limited to narrowband (NB). It has been shown, however, that wideband (WB) communications produce a higher quality speech signal compared to conventional NB. Additionally, the channel bandwidth plays a critical role in enabling speaker recognition since important voice features are widely distributed in the frequency domain. The goal of the present study is to determine the benefits on human speaker identification when the speech is transmitted through channels with different characteristics such as bandwidth and coding algorithms. Our results indicate that standard wideband transmission offers significant improvements over narrowband, allowing listeners to identify known speakers more precisely and faster.