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arXiv · 2608.07980

The Voiceprint Fallacy: Why Voices Are Not Unique Biometric Imprints

Tianle Yang·Cuiling Zhang·Chengzhe Sun·Siwei Lyu·Phil Rose
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Abstract

In recent years, the term voiceprint has regained attention, particularly in technological applications and policy-making contexts, often carrying the assumption that a person's voice constitutes a stable and unique biometric trace analogous to a fingerprint. Yet this conception has been repeatedly criticized and rejected by forensic voice experts throughout the decades since its introduction. Although voices undoubtedly contain speaker-related information, this simplified conception obscures the highly dynamic and context-dependent nature of speech. This article revisits the voiceprint fallacy and reconsiders what can count as evidence of speaker identity by reviewing the historical development of voiceprint identification, evidence on human voice variability, developments in forensic voice comparison, research on human and automatic speaker recognition, and the recent challenge posed by deepfake speech to speaker identity. We point out that the voiceprint metaphor and its underlying implications are scientifically misleading because they transform a probabilistic source of speaker information into an imagined stable object of identity. We argue that speaker identity assessment does not require, and current evidence does not support, the existence of a stable and individually unique voiceprint. For speaker recognition and voice biometrics, this distinction motivates interpreting learned speaker representations with respect to the conditions under which they are trained and evaluated, and explicitly assessing their robustness to relevant sources of within-speaker variability, domain mismatch, and synthetic manipulation.

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Tianle Yang, Cuiling Zhang, Chengzhe Sun, Siwei Lyu, Phil Rose. 2026-08-21. The Voiceprint Fallacy: Why Voices Are Not Unique Biometric Imprints. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07980

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