A device for verifying the identity of a speaker based on his spoken speech, said device comprising a voice input device for receiving a speaker's voice and processing it for further comparison, a bank of first order filters coupled to said voice input device, each of said filters being tuned to a preselected frequency, a covariance estimator coupled to said filter bank for estimating filter covariances, a decoder coupled to said covariance estimator for producing a plurality of filter parameters, and a comparator for comparing said produced filter parameters with prerecorded speaker input filter parameters and thereby verifying the speaker's identity or not.