Do you mean like "speaker recognition"? If so, wikipedia provides the following summary of methods:
"Speaker recognition is a pattern recognition problem. The various technologies used to process and store voice prints include frequency estimation, hidden Markov models, Gaussian mixture models, pattern matching algorithms, neural networks, matrix representation, vector quantization and decision trees. For comparing utterances against voice prints, more basic methods like cosine similarity are traditionally used for their simplicity and performance. Some systems also use "anti-speaker" techniques such as cohort models and world models. Spectral features are predominantly used in representing speaker characteristics. Linear predictive coding (LPC) is a speech coding method used in speaker recognition and speech verification".
Thank you Terzi. It's not exactly what I'm looking for, but your comment is a very positive step forward, and it's very supportive. I wish I could talk with you in person and "squeeze" out more information from you! I just looked at your background, and know you are working on something acoustic. You definitely have much more to offer!