Speech-to-Gender Recognition Based on Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Speech recognition has several application areas such as human machine interaction, classification of phone calls by gender, voice tagging, STT, etc. Predicting gender from audio signals is a problem that is easy for humans to solve, difficult to solve by a computer. In this study, a model based on MFCC and classification with machine learning is proposed for gender estimation from Turkish voice signals. Within the scope of the study, 58 different series and films were examined and a new original dataset was created with 894 audio recordings consisting of 5 sec sections taken from them. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and spectrogram, which are frequently used in the literature, were used for feature extraction from audio data. The results were first evaluated separately using two features in one way. A hybrid feature vector was then created using two feature vectors. Different machine learning algorithms (LR, DT, RF, XGB etc.) were tested in the classification process and it was seen that the best accuracy was achieved in the hybrid model and logistic regression with 89%. Recall, precision and f-score values were obtained as 86.8%, 92% and 89.3%, respectively. The obtained test results revealed that the proposed model, together with the hybrid feature vector used, the original dataset and the classifier based on machine learning, showed classification success in terms of accuracy and was a stable and robust model.