In this paper we provide a brief overview of the area of speaker recognition, describing applications, underlying techniques and some indications, of performance. Following this overview we will discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of current speaker recognition technologies and outline some potential future trends in research, development and applications conducting other speech interactions (background verification). As speaker and speech recognition system merge and speech recognition accuracy improves, the distinction between text- independent and -dependent applications will decrease. Of the two basic tasks, text-dependent speaker verification is currently