Voice Fingerprinting

The Independent has an interesting article on voice fingerprinting -

Fuelled by 9/11, spurred on by the advance of our digital society and made possible by raw computing power, the development of increasingly sophisticated automated speaker recognition systems (ASRS) are now bringing the prospect of a voiceprint enticingly close...These systems can in as little as 15 minutes use a background population of voices to make a statistical judgement on the significance of any similarity or difference between the voice of the criminal and that of a suspect that could have taken a human 15 hours to complete.

Like computer vision and video fingerprinting, voice fingerprinting will be a great digital frontier to conquer.

Also see: Raman Effect can fingerprint the universe