Why Talk to People When You Can Talk to Robots? Far-Field Speaker Identification in the Wild

We present a speaker-aware robotic system which recognizes users by voice in realistic, noisy conditions, highlighting the potential of speaker identification to enrich industrial and social HRI. We approach this as a CNN-based audio classification task, with the particular aim of producing fast, reliable, and explainable predictions. Our method is evaluated on a challenging 6-speaker dataset collected "in the wild" and showcased in a manufacturing scenario, where a collaborative robot personalizes its responses and prevents non-authorized users from executing commands.