Voice Recognition

Voice recognition, or “earwitness” identification, has not received the amount of research or public interest that eyewitness identification has received in recent years. A 1983 survey of British legal cases, however, found more than 180 cases at that time in which voice [Page 852]identifications were used as evidence. But a growing body of research suggests that the use of voice identifications in court is just as dangerous, if not more so, than reliance on eyewitness identification. Research consistently shows that voice recognition is less accurate than face recognition under similar circumstances and that the same factors that affect eyewitness reliability can also create problems for the earwitness. Potential jurors, however, often overestimate the accuracy of voice recognition in forensic contexts.